B 


UC-NRLF 


<dntv>ersitE  of  Cbicago 

FOUNDED  BY  JOHN  D.  ROCKEFELLER 


PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN 
KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 


A  DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED  TO   THE  FACULTY  OF  THE  DEPARTMENT  OF  ARTS  AMD 

LITERATURE  IN  CANDIDACY  FOR  THE  DEGREE 

OF   DOCTOR  OF   PHILOSOPHY 

(DEPARTMENT  OF  PHILOSOPHY) 


BY 

CHARLES  EDGAR  WITTER 


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UftttV 


CHICAGO 
1913 


ITbe  Tant\>ersit£  of  Cbicaoo 

FOUNDED  BY  JOHN   D.  ROCKEFELLER 


PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN 
KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 


A  DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED   TO   THE  FACULTY  OF   THE  DEPARTMENT  OF   ARTS  AND 
LITERATURE   IN  CANDIDACY  FOR  THE  DEGREE 

OF  DOCTOR  OF  PHILOSOPHY 
(DEPARTMENT  OF  PHILOSOPHY) 


BY 

CHARLES  EDGAR  WITTER 


CHICAGO 
1913 


Composed  and  Printed  By 

The  University  oJ  Chicaeo  Press 

Chicago,  Illinois.  U.S.A. 


PREFACE 

Pragmatism  is  "a  new  name  for  old  ways  of  thinking" — some  of  the 
old  ways.  Its  mission  and  its  merit  consist,  then,  not  in  introducing  an 
entirely  novel  standpoint,  but  in  helping  to  disentangle  the  functional, 
dynamic  viewpoint  from  the  remnants  of  rationalism  or  intellectualism 
contained  in  most  philosophical  systems,  whether  they  be  of  the  idealistic 
or  the  materialistic  order. 

Pragmatism  was  practically  influential  long  before  it  was  recognized 
as  a  mode  of  philosophy.  It  was  operative  in  ethical  and  educational 
theory.  A  decade  ago  Dewey  rendered  a  service  in  the  critical  study  of 
logic  by  showing  that  there  were  functional  elements  in  Lotze.  Addison 
W.  Moore  made  a  similarly  valuable  contribution  in  his  comparison  of 
the  representational  and  functional  aspects  of  Locke's  Essay — a  con- 
tribution that  was  immediately  reviewed  by  Schiller.  Doubtless  this 
contrast  between  a  practical  conception  of  the  real  work  of  thought  as 
one  of  the  factors  in  human  development  and  the  copy  view  of  ideas 
might  be  found  in  any  one  of  the  historic  philosophers,  indeed  might  be 
traced  far  back  into  the  roots  of  historic  development  in  the  Greek 
thinkers. 

The  undertaking  to  study  Kant's  system  from  the  pragmatic  stand- 
point was  made  from  several  considerations.  Kant  himself  was  the 
clearing-house  for  a  vast  amount  of  antecedent  and  contemporary 
thought.  His  very  effort  to  mediate  between  a  raw  empiricism  and  the 
old  scholastic  dogmatism  indicated  that  he  appreciated  the  difficulties  in 
either  standpoint  and  wished  to  find  a  way  out.  Technically  he  remained 
a  rationalist  but  he  was  the  initiator  of  an  epoch  that  issues  legitimately 
in  the  modern  dynamic  attitude  toward  truth  and  reality.  Kant  points 
two  ways — toward  idealism  and  toward  pragmatism.  It  was  the 
"transcendental"  in  his  system  that  long  obscured  the  functional  and 
led  his  followers  off  on  the  wrong  path.  The  influence  and  the  interpre- 
tation of  that  "transcendental"  are  today  not  far  from  the  firing-line  of 
philosophical  debate  and  advance. 

The  pragmatic  movement,  moreover,  is  constantly  brought  into 
comparison  and  relation  to  Kant  whether  we  will  or  no.  The  very  terms 
"practical  reason,"  "theoretical  reason,"  and  the  contrast  between  them 
are  his  invention.  The  "postulates  of  the  practical  reason"  is  a  phrase 
so  strikingly  similar,  even  in  sound,  to  the  principles  of  pragmatic 


270928 


IV  PREFACE 

inquiry  that  it  is  on  the  lips  of  pragmatic  thinkers  constantly.  It 
arouses  the  feeling,  even  without  accurate  analysis,  that  Kant  realized, 
after  all,  the  true  nature  of  thinking  as  an  active  process  growing  out  of 
life  itself.  Yet  it  has  been  assumed  by  many  that  Kant's  system  stands 
for  the  fixed  and  the  unmodifiable  in  thought  and  reality.  A  clear 
exposition  of  his  functional  leading,  if  it  be  contained  in  his  work,  should 
be  of  aid  not  only  to  pragmatism  in  giving  it  historic  dignity,  but  also  to 
a  true  estimate  of  Kant's  place  in  the  development  of  human  thought 
and  life. 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

1.  INTRODUCTION .  i 

2.  SPACE  AND  TIME 7 

3.  THE  MIND'S  CONSTRUCTION  OF  NATURE 16 

4.  THE  SCHEMATISM  OF  THE  CATEGORIES 25 

5.  THE  REGULATIVE  USE  OF  REASON — THE  ANTINOMIES    ....  31 

6.  THE  IDEAL  OF  REASON 39 

7.  KANT'S  TELEOLOGY  VERSUS  MECHANICAL  CAUSALITY     ....  50 

8.  POSTULATES  OF  PRACTICAL  REASON  FOR  THE  MORAL  AND  RELIGIOUS 

LIFE 57 

9.  THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 65 

10.  BIBLIOGRAPHY 74 


INTRODUCTION 

Kant's  criticism  was  the  center  from  which  may  be  traced,  roughly 
speaking,  three  lines  of  development.  One  main  line  took  its  rise  from 
Kant's  teaching  regarding  the  a  priori  functions  of  the  theoretical  reason. 
This  line  culminates  in  Hegel  and  the  neo-Hegelians.  Its  essence 
consists  in  abstracting  Kant's  thought-forms  and  making  them  absolute; 
in  explaining  content  as  determined  by  form;  in  affirming  a  logical 
reality  higher  than  that  appearing  in  the  world  of  experience.  A  second 
main  line  may  be  traced  to  Kant's  doctrine  of  the  primacy  of  the  practical 
reason.  This  movement  is  represented  by  Fichte  and  Schopenhauer 
who  developed  two  aspects  of  Kant's  conception  of  will.  For  Kant, 
will  seems  to  be  a  complex  of  two  factors:  first,  inclination  or  desire, 
and  secondly,  reason  as  setting  up  ideals  and  putting  them  into  action. 
A  double  line  of  voluntarism  appears  in  Fichte's  connection  with  the 
second  of  these  factors,  an  aspect  of  his  thought  not  covered  by  his 
idealism,  and  in  Schopenhauer's  attachment  to  the  first  factor. 
Schopenhauer,  taking  his  point  of  departure  in  the  Kantian  distinction 
between  " thing-in-itself "  and  "appearance" — a  distinction  which 
absolute  idealism  in  its  own  way  sought  to  obliterate — endeavored  to 
find  in  his  own  soul  life  a  piece  of  reality  given,  existing  in  the  form  in 
which  we  know  it.  From  this  piece  of  reality  Schopenhauer  thought  we 
could  infer  the  whole  reality  by  analogy.  He  would  use  the  insight  won 
in  a  psychological  way  as  a  "regulative  principle,"  to  adopt  Kant's 
phraseology.  For  this  principle  the  practical  reason,  not  the  theoretical, 
is  the  source.  The  conflict  between  intellectualism  and  voluntarism  is 
solved  in  Schopenhauer  by  subsuming  under  will  all  psychical  occur- 
rences, but  the  rationalistic  element  in  his  thinking  asserts  itself  in  his 
adherence  to  a  unity  as  the  ultimate  ground — a  unity  still  conceived  in 
an  abstract-logical  sense.  The  third  main  line  of  development  boasting 
its  lineage  from  Kant  is  empiricism.  Passing  by  those  problems  upon 
which  Kant  placed  such  great  worth,  and  fortifying  itself  upon  that 
feature  of  the  Kantian  thought  which  affirmed  that  knowledge  is  limited 
to  the  empirical  world,  empiricism  has  ignored  the  treatment  of  the 
"Transcendental  Aesthetic"  and  the  "Transcendental  Analytic"  and 
has  turned  back  gladly  to  Hume. 

Pragmatism  enters  the  arena  with  a  clear  title  of  its  own.  Reacting 
strongly  against  the  absolutism  of  the  first  main  line  of  development,  it 


2  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

assumes  the  role  of  a  better  empiricism.  Empiricism  itself  had  shown  a 
strongly  marked  intellectualistic  disposition,  failing  utterly  to  do  justice 
to  the  organism's  reaction  upon  its  environment.  Pragmatism  trans- 
plants empiricism  to  the  region  of  voluntarism  and  is  thus  in  better 
position  to  overcome  the  opposition  between  Kant's  rationalism  and  his 
empiricism  than  was  any  movement  of  thought  that  has  yet  appeared 
since  the  epoch  of  criticism  itself.  It  may  safely  be  affirmed  that  in 
pragmatism  philosophic  thought  moves  in  the  direction  from  Hegel 
back  to  Kant.  For  while  the  faithful  follower  of  Hegel  may  assert  that 
his  genesis  of  the  categories  is  more  pragmatic  than  Kant's  given,  fixed 
categories,  it  is  all  too  evident  that  in  the  end  this  supposed  genesis  lacks 
any  genuine  quality.  As  Sturt  says,  "A  changeless  development  is  not 
merely  a  difficult  conception;  it  is  downright  nonsense."1  All  of  the 
apparent  development  in  Hegel  and  the  neo-Hegelians  is  merely  the 
phenomenal  unfolding  of  the  timeless  absolute  idea,  which  is  the  sole 
reality.  For  pragmatic  purposes  thought  must  move  back  to  the 
vantage-ground  of  criticism,  to  gain  a  fresh  start  in  the  study  of  the 
properly  constructive  character  of  mental  activity,  to  see  the  function 
of  knowledge  as  one  of  the  factors  in  reality.  It  cannot  be  committed 
to  a  plan  given  and  finished  in  advance.  Pragmatism  is  deflected  at 
times  from  this  straight  backward  path,  in  tracing  its  historic  origins, 
not  only  by  its  antipathy  to  the  rationalistic  elements  latent  in  criticism 
itself,  but  also  by  its  affinity  for  the  results  of  modern  psychology  which 
were  either  unknown  to  Kant  or  were  at  no  time  in  the  focus  of  his 
attention. 

If  it  can  be  shown  that  the  salient  features  of  the  pragmatic  attitude 
are  contained  either  explicitly  or  implicitly  in  Kant's  thinking,  several 
distinct  points  will  be  gained  for  the  pragmatic  movement  and,  possibly, 
for  the  interests  of  real  intellectual  progress.  First,  it  may  appear  that 
the  critical  movement  of  thought  was  not  a  mere  waste,  to  say  the  least ; 
that  we  do  not,  as  James  has  suggested,  have  to  short-circuit  the  great 
German  thinker,  though  it  may  result  that  we  have  short-circuited  some 
of  the  idealistic  systems  that  succeeded  him.  Secondly,  it  may  be  seen 
that  pragmatism  is  not  a  mere  by-path  from  the  main  road  of  philosophic 
development,  but  preserves  the  line  of  historic  continuity  and  sequence. 
Thirdly,  by  finding  and  accrediting  itself  in  the  great  thinker  who  stands 
historically  as  the  gateway  to  modern  thought,  pragmatism  may  at  least 
challenge  the  right  of  absolute  idealism  to  usurp  the  leadership  over  the 
philosophical  world,  to  claim  for  speculative  philosophy  the  sole  key  to 

1  Idola  Theatri,  p.  186. 


INTRODUCTION  3 

reality  and  the  meaning  of  things.  Fourthly,  in  revealing  the  arrogance 
of  pure  intellectualism  generally,  it  may  serve  to  show  the  weakness  of 
that  form  of  scientific  investigation — so  called — that  was  provoked  in 
opposition  to  speculative  systems — the  craving  for  mere  blind  facts — 
and  may  lead  thought  back  to  the  vantage-ground  of  modesty  with 
which  the  effort  of  criticism  set  forth  originally.  The  oft-repeated  cry, 
"Back  to  Kant,"  may  be  found  to  have  vital  significance. 

That  there  are  close  resemblances  between  pragmatism  and 
Kantianism  is  apparent  even  to  the  casual  reader.  As  George  A.  Coe 
remarks,  "From  the  historical  side  pragmatism  appears  as  a  new  pre- 
sentation of  empiricism,  or  a  new  development  of  the  Kantian  doctrine  < 

of  the  primacy  of  the  practical  reason  as  against  the  theoretical."1  The 
most  naive  student,  when  he  reads  of  the  Will-to-Belieye  and  of  Kant's 
postulates  of  the  practical  reason  is  movecTto  exclaim,  "How  very 
modern  this  Kant  is  after  all."  The  relation  of  pragmatism  to  criticism 
is  forcefully  suggested  in  Schiller's  declaration  that  if  Kant  had  been 
twenty  years  younger  when  the  full  significance  of  postulating  dawned 
upon  him  he  would  have  rewritten  his  great  work  from  the  avowedly 
pragmatic  standpoint.  How  close  or  how  loose  some  of  these  intimated 
comparisons  and  relationships  are  we  hope  to  discover  as  we  proceed. 

Historically,  two  systems  of  thought  met  in  Kant — rationalism  and 
empiricism.  It  is  our  conviction  that  throughout  his  thinking  two  systems 
or  aspects  are  apparent — the  transcendental  and  what  we  moderns 
designate  as  the  functional  or  the  pragmatic.  In  his  "transcendental" 
we  see  the  influence  of  inherited  rationalistic  assumptions  from  which 
he  was  unable  wholly  to  escape;  but  when  we  come  to  examine  his  use 
of  the  transcendental — the  practical  application  of  it  when  it  has  any 
meaning — we  come  upon  distinctly  pragmatic  tendencies.  Kantianism, 
relieved  of  transcendentalism,  yields  virtually  pragmatism.  Kant  stands 
with  his  face  toward  the  modern,  functional  view  of  life  and  reality,  even 
when  he  is  unable  to  express  himself  to  that  effect  in  the  letter  of  his 
terminology. 

It  would,  of  course,  be  idle  to  ignore,  at  the  outset,  the  too  static 
character  of  his  system.  He  antedates  evolution  and  the  biological 
approach  to  the  problems  of  psychology  and  life.  To  be  sure  Paul 
Carus  thinks  that  Kant — particularly  the  young  Kant,  the  Kant  of  the 
first  edition,  the  author  of  the  Presumable  Origin  of  Humanity,  of  the 
treatise,  Upon  the  Different  Races  of  Mankind,  and  of  The  General 
History  and  Theory  of  the  Heavens — leaned  strongly  toward  the  evolution 

1  Methodist  Review,  1908,  p.  212. 


4  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

hypothesis;  that  he  recognized  "neither  the  stability  of  species  nor  any 
fixed  limits  between  them,"  and  that  "he  discusses  the  origin  of  the 
species  of  man  in  a  way  which  would  do  honor  to  a  follower  of  Darwin."1 
But  while  the  younger  Kant,  in  his  most  scientific  moods,  may  have  had 
fitful  foregleams  of  the  evolution  of  species  and  of  the  survival  of  the 
fittest,  there  is,  unfortunately,  "no  evolution  in  his  categories"  when  he 
sets  himself  to  his  great  work  in  the  examination  of  knowledge.  In 
common  with  the  ancients  who  rightly  held  that  ultimately  the  problems 
of  science  and  metaphysics  are  identical,  he  wrongly  considers  his 
concepts  fixed  and  unalterable — "these  and  this  exact  number  only." 
Yet  with  all  his  dogmatic  background  and  environment  it  may  still  be 
indicated  that  the  epoch  opened  by  him  in  the  evolution  of  thought 
extends  legitimately  through  all  the  one-sided  systems  that  have 
-  attempted  to  complete  his  work  and  reaches  our  most  modern  dynamic 
conception  of  thought  and  life;  that  he  was  essentially  pragmatic  in  his 
view  of  the  nature  of  truth,  the  criterion  of  truth,  and,  possibly,  the 
nature  of  reality. 

/  His  rationalistic  inheritance  from  the  past  appears  in  his  separation 
of  sense  and  understanding  and  in  his  retention  of  things-in-themselves. 
He  practically  accepts  with  Hume  the  isolated,  relationless  sense  elements 
which  require  to  be  combined  for  knowledge.  To  be  sure,  after  he  has 
laboriously  shown  how  these  are  combined  by  the  forms  and  categories 
of  the  mind,  he  virtually  repudiates  them  and  proves  that  they  could 
never  have  existed  in  the  abstracted,  relationless  form  in  which  he  sets 
out  with  them.  He  seems,  however,  never  to  discover  the  full  meaning 
of  this  truth.  A  deeper  study  of  this  important  fact  would  have  helped 
to  square  him  completely  with  the  modern  functional  viewpoint.  The 
transcendental  deduction  assumes  in  its  premises  what  it  emphatically 
denies  in  its  conclusion.  To  get  unification  he  thinks  we  must  introduce 
a  transcendental  element — spaceless  and  timeless;  yet,  having  assumed 
in  the  "Transcendental  Aesthetic"  these  atomistic  entities,  he  turns 
around  and  rejects  them  in  the  "Transcendental  Analytic."  This 
would  seem  to  imply  that  the  desired  unity  may  be  attained  without  the 
transcendental  element.  Had  this  separation  been  less  sharp  in  his 
mind  to  begin  with,  the  thought  implicit  in  his  entire  system  might  have 
reached  explicit  recognition,  namely,  that  sense  material  has  connections 
of  its  own,  or  otherwise  speaking,  that  sense  material  standing  by  itself 
is  a  mere  abstraction,  an  unwarrantable  assumption.  Kant  and  the 
objective  idealists  who  followed  him  assumed  that  whatever  is  distin- 

1  Kant  and  Spencer,  p.  42. 


INTRODUCTION  5 

guishable  is  separable.  All  idealistic  systems  need  this  assumption  to 
make  out  a  case,  and  when  the  assumption  is  exposed,  their  case  tumbles. 
Their  problem  is  how,  out  of  a  congeries  of  atoms,  to  get  an  experience, 
but  as  Dewey  well  says,  "That  red,  or  far  and  near,  or  hard  and  soft,  or 
big  and  little  involve  a  relation  between  organism  and  environment  is 
no  more  an  argument  for  idealism  than  is  the  fact  that  water  involves 
a  relation  between  oxygen  and  hydrogen.  It  is,  however,  an  argument 
for  the  ultimately  practical  value  of  these  distinctions — that  they  are 
differences  made  in  what  things  would  have  been  without  organic  behavior 
— differences  made  not  by  consciousness  or  mind,  but  by  the  organism 
as  the  active  center  of  a  system  of  activities."1  Kant  makes  an  artificial 
separation  between  his  sense-impressions  and  his  concepts  which  he  says 
are  pure.  The  real  distinction  between  the  two  is  functional  and  may 
vary  with  the  situation.  Kant  seems  to  use  it  as  an  ontological  dis- 
tinction hard  and  fast.  Instead  of  taking  the  experience  just  as  it 
presents  itself — datum  and  meaning  included — he  first  puts  his  sense- 
qualities  and  his  concepts  into  tight  compartments.  This  is  not  always 
the  case,  as  we  are  endeavoring  to  point  out,  but  in  the  "Aesthetic" 
especially  he  treats  his  a  priori  elements  and  his  empirical  elements  as 
actual  entities,  existing  in  independence  of  each  other,  prior  to  their 
union  by  the  transcendental  forms.  All  transcendentalists  make  the 
same  mistake.  Bradley,  for  instance,  says  that  in  our  sensation  of  black 
certain  relations  of  comparison  and  discrimination  are  constituents. 
He  forgets  that  this  is  true  only  when  we  begin  to  ask  questions  about  it. 
He  says  these  relations  are  present  transcendentally,  as  did  Kant.  He 
substitutes  the  black  of  the  discriminated  experience  as  the  situation 
from  which  we  get  our  notion  of  what  quality  is  and  then  equates  the 
two  experiences.  That  is,  he  takes  a  situation  where  datum  and  meaning 
have  been  developed,  where  the  discriminated  and  related  qualities  are 
experienced  in  reflective  analysis  and  throws  this  back  into  situations  of 
the  non-reflective  sort.  Sense  content  does  not  mean  anything  apart 
from  relations  of  meaning,  but,  says  Bradley,  the  sense  content  is  not 
created  by  these  relations  of  meaning,  hence  intellect  can  do  nothing 
with  it  and  we  have  contradiction.  He  does  not  realize  that  in  making 
the  distinction  between  the  sense-elements  and  thought  we  have  changed 
the  character  of  the  experience;  that  when  experience  is  thus  transformed 
we  have  experienced  datum  and  experienced  meaning.  He  overlooks 
the  fact  that  in  our  actual  experience  there  is  no  datum  other  than  that 
of  meaning.  Just  so  Kant  takes  a  sense-impression,  abstracts  it  from 

1  Essays  Philosophical  and  Psychological  in  Honor  of  William  James,  p.  66. 


6  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

its  concrete  situation,  and  makes  a  formal  unity  of  it.     He  does  the  same 
with  thought  or  with  his  concepts. 

Despite  this  separation  on  the  part  of  Kant,  however,  there  is  a  near 
approach  to  the  pragmatic  method  in  his  three-fold  synthesis  of  appre- 
hension, reproduction,  and  recognition.  He  moves  away  from  crude 
realism  and  in  the  direction  of  functionalism  in  arguing  that,  instead  of 
our  cognition  conforming  to  objects,  objects  must  conform  to  our  mode 
of  cognition.  At  the  very  outset  of  the  "Aesthetic"  he  lifts  space  and 
time  out  of  the  hands  of  every  form  of  crude  realism  although  he  makes 
it  rather  easy  for  them  to  lapse  into  the  arms  of  absolutism.  Pragmatism 
takes  one  of  its  chief  inspirations  in  breaking  away  from  the  representa- 
tional view  of  knowledge — the  view  that  our  scientific  ideas  are  exact 
copies  of  external  or  trans-empirical  realities.  Kant  would  seem  to  be 
in  harmony  with  this  attitude  in  holding  that  the  mind  furnishes  con- 
stituent factors — helps  to  build  its  own  ideas  of  natural  science.  He 
differs  from  the  pragmatist  in  abstracting  sharply  this  work  of  the 
understanding  in  thus  furnishing  the  relating  factors.  He  sees  that  the 
mind  contributes  something  to  the  determination  of  the  object — so  far 
pragmatic.  He  cannot  grasp  the  full  truth  that  the  perception  of  the 
object  is  just  one  whole  piece  of  experience.  It  was  the  false  separation 
left  between  datum  and  meaning  that  offered  the  opening  wedge  for 
idealistic  systems.  Kant  says  or  implies  that  all  experience  is  not  self- 
conscious  but  potentially  self-conscious.  This  implies  a  set  of  relations 
not  in  experience,  and  just  here  we  have  the  root  of  Bradley's  puzzles, 
as  has  been  indicated.  From  this  spring  T.  H.  Green's  efforts  to  bring 
relations  and  sense-impressions  together.  Green  identifies  knowledge 
with  all  relationships  and  finds,  therefore,  that  it  is  not  derived  from 
nature.  Elsewhere  Green  uses  knowledge  as  a  mere  temporal  function. 
This  confusion  and  error  in  his  thought  is  plainly  attributable  to  the 
influence  of  German  idealism.  As  Sturt  says,  "Kant's  influence  led 
him  to  make  an  absolute  separation  between  the  synthetic  consciousness 
and  the  empirical  stream,  and  to  say  that  the  synthetic  consciousness  is 
changeless  or  out  of  time  entirely."1  He  and  all  the  absolutists  use 
knowledge  in  the  two  senses.  Knowledge  as  a  temporal  function  is 
forgotten,  its  dynamic  and  purposeful  implications  are  ignored,  and 
hence  the  metaphysical  riddles. 

1  Essays  Philosophical  and  Psychological  in  Honor  of  William  James,  p.  240. 


SPACE  AND  TIME 

In  Kant's  treatment,  first  of  all,  of  space  and  time — the  fundamental 
forms  of  or  rather  for  perception — he  has  both  a  transcendental  and  a 
functional  use.  To  experience  things  in  space  and  time  we  must  have  a 
space  and  time  into  which  to  put  them.  Therefore  they  are  not  derived 
from  experience  but  are  preconditions.  In  the  "Aesthetic"  he  says: 
"  Time  is  not  an  empirical  conception.  Time  is  given  a  priori."1  Yet  he 
elsewhere  remarks:  "Time  is  nothing  in  abstraction  from  the  conditions 
of  sensible  perception."2  If  he  had  stopped  to  ask  himself  the  meaning 
of  this  functionalism,  to  analyze  and  elaborate  the  significance  of  this 
contradiction,  he  might  have  been  led  farther  on  the  path  of  the  instru- 
mental character  of  knowledge.  Holding  the  mathematical  viewpoint, 
he  stresses  the  continuity  aspect  of  these  forms,  failing  to  notice  suffi- 
ciently that  from  the  practical  viewpoint  they  receive  their  content  from 
discrete  objects  and  events.  Other  expressions,  however,  are  not 
wanting  to  contradict  his  notion  of  an  intuition  of  an  objective  time  as 
an  infinite  necessary  continuum:  "Time  is  nothing  but  the  form  of  our 
own  internal  intuition.  Take  away  the  peculiar  condition  of  our  sen- 
sibility, and  the  idea  of  time  vanishes,  because  it  is  not  inherent  in  the 
objects,  but  in  the  subject  only  that  perceives  them."3  If  the  latter 
statement  is  true,  accepting  for  the  moment  its  subjectivistic  character- 
ization, we  scarcely  need  the  subsequent  debate  in  the  "Antinomies"  as 
to  our  ability  to  imagine  time  either  as  ending  or  as  going  on  forever. 
For  our  purposes  we  want  neither  to  go  to  the  end  of  time  nor  to  divide 
it  up  into  infinite  atoms.  Our  conception  of  time  is  adequate  for  all  the 
purposes  to  which  we  need  to  put  it  and  this  is  implied  in  the  outcome  of 
Kant's  discussion  of  this  antinomy,  namely,  that  only  the  one  use  of  it, 
the  functional,  phenomenal,  will  ever  benefit  us.  "What  it  does  deter- 
mine is  the  relation  of  ideas  in  our  own  inner  state."4  Bawden  well 
says:  "Antinomies  result  from  the  attempt  to  conceive  empty  space  and 
time  apart  from  the  concrete  experience  where  they  have  meaning.  We 
cannot  perceive  empty  space  and  time,  but  only  objects  and  events. 
Pure  space  and  time  are  artifacts  like  '  the  average  child '  or '  the  economic 
man.'"5  Kant,  in  his  summation  of  this  matter,  swings  back  to  his 

1  Watson,  Selections,  p.  30. 

3  Ibid.,  p.  34.  3  Ibid.,  p.  35.  <  Ibid.,  p.  32. 

s  The  Principles  of  Pragmatism,  p.  273. 

* 

7 


8  PRAGMATIC   ELEMENTS   IN   KANT  S   PHILOSOPHY 

transcendental  use  and  yet,  even  in  that  very  use,  implies  the  functional 
application  of  it  to  make  any  sense:  "Phenomena  have,  therefore,  no 
existence  apart  from  our  consciousness  of  them:  and  that  is  what  we 
mean  by  their  transcendental  ideality."1  Again  he  declares:  "Tran- 
scendental 'Aesthetic'  cannot  count  the  concept  of  change  among  its 
a  priori  data,  because  time  itself  does  not  change,  but  only  something 
which  is  in  time.  For  this,  the  perception  of  something  existing  and  of 
the  succession  of  its  determinations,  in  other  words,  experience,  is 
required."2  Here  he  grasps  the  fact  that  it  is  change,  succession  that 
really  afford  the  perception  of  time,  yet  he  abstracts  time  itself  as  a 
concept.  He  does  not  pause  to  realize  the  necessarily  concrete  character 
of  change. 

Similarly,  of  space,  he  writes:  "Space  is  not  an  empirical  perception 
which  has  been  derived  from  external  perceptions.  Space  is  a  necessary 
a  priori  idea  which  is  presupposed  in  all  external  perceptions."3  He  says 
we  experience  space  as  a  unity.  Here  he  evidently  confuses  mathe- 
matical and  psychological  space.  We  may  conceive  space  as  a  unity, 
but  we  actually  experience  only  individual  spaces.  So  true  is  this  that, 
as  James  says,  "Most  of  us  are  obliged  to  turn  round  and  drop  the 
thought  of  the  space  in  front  of  us  when  we  think  of  that  behind."4 
Later  on  Kant  himself  says:  "Space  and  time  are  quanta  continua, 
because  no  part  of  them  can  be  presented  that  is  not  inclosed  between 
limits  (points  or  moments)  and  therefore  each  part  of  space  is  itself  a 
space,  each  part  of  time  is  itself  a  time.  Space  consists  only  of  spaces, 
time  of  times.  There  is  no  way  of  proving  from  experience  that  there 
is  empty  space  and  empty  time";5  and  very  significantly  for  our  present 
purposes  in  his  Metaphysical  Elements  of  Natural  Science,  where  he 
must  necessarily  touch  upon  the  real  value  of  this  form  or  category,  he 
adds:  "The  absolute  void  and  the  absolute  plenum  are  in  the  science  of 
nature  pretty  much  the  same  thing  as  blind  chance  and  blind  fate  are  in 
metaphysical  cosmology,  namely,  a  bar  to  inquiring  reason.  Every- 
thing that  relieves  us  from  the  need  of  taking  refuge  in  empty  space  is  a 
real  gain  for  natural  science."6 

Thus  he  first  dogmatically  assumes  space  and  time  as  ontological 
realities,  or  if  not  quite  ontological  realities  as  transcendental  idealities 
— yet,  when  it  comes  to  concrete  experience,  which  it  must  be  noticed 

1  Watson,  Selections,  p.  173. 

2  Mueller's  Trans.,  p.  33.  « Psych.,  II,  275. 

s  Ibid.,  p.  18.  s  Watson,  Selections,  p.  98. 

6  Metaphysische  Anfangsgrunde  der  Wissenschaft,  IV,  427. 


SPACE   AND  TIME  9 

is  his  only  sphere  of  knowledge,  space  and  time  reduce  to  merely  empirical 
cash  value.  Or,  if  this  is  held  to  be  not  antecedently  the  only  alternative, 
what  are  space  and  time  if  not  pure  forms  ?  He  treats  them  sometimes 
as  pure  forms,  sometimes  as  something  else.  He  inevitably  raises  this 
question,  which  remains  unanswered. 

It  seems  highly  significant,  in  Kant's  whole  treatment  of  space  and 
time  and  particularly  of  space,  that  he  resorts  constantly  to  mathematics 
for  an  illustration  of  necessary  a  priori  forms  of  knowledge  and,  as 
someone  has  remarked,  it  is  always  to  pure  mathematics,  making  no 
distinction  between  it  and  applied  mathematics.  It  may  reasonably  be 
held  that  if  Kant  had  placed  less  rationalistic  confidence  in  the  a  priori 
certainty  of  mathematical  knowledge,  he  would  have  succeeded  in  shifting 
the  emphasis  from  constitutive  to  regulative  in  the  treatment  of  all  his 
forms  and  categories,  instead  of  limiting  the  latter  to  certain  "ideas  of 
reason."  It  seems  deplorable  that  his  criticism  could  not,  at  the  outset, 
have  been  turned  to  a  more  minute  and  genetic  inquiry  into  the  real 
character  of  geometry.  He  says: 

On  the  necessity  of  an  a  priori  representation  of  space  rests  the  apodictic 
certainty  of  geometrical  principles  and  the  possibility  of  their  construction 
a  priori.  For  if  the  intuition  of  space  were  a  concept  gained  a  posteriori, 
borrowed  from  general  external  experience,  the  first  principles  of  mathematical 
definition  would  be  nothing  but  perceptions.  They  would  be  exposed  to  all 
the  accidents  of  perception,  and  there  being  but  one  straight  line  between  two 
points  would  not  be  a  necessity,  but  only  something  taught  in  each  case  by 
experience.  Whatever  is  derived  from  experience  possesses  a  relative  generality 
only,  based  on  induction.  We  should  therefore  not  be  able  to  say  more  than 
that,  so  far  as  hitherto  observed,  no  space  has  yet  been  found  having  more  than 
three  dimensions,1 

Along  with  Descartes  he  accepts  mathematics  as  the  ideal  of  scientific 
method.  Particularly  in  his  Prolegomena  Kant  practically  contradicts 
his  real  critical  position  in  this  respect.  In  accepting  and  so  readily 
explaining  mathematics  and  physics  as  actual  and  valid  bodies  of 
knowledge  that  need  no  epistemological  examination  and  vindication, 
he  virtually  abandons  his  critical  ground  and  takes  for  gi anted  what  he 
started  out  to  prove  critically.  His  convenient  straight  line  itself 
should  have  been  subjected  to  a  more  severe  genetic  examination. 
Ladd  says: 

If  one  wants  to  know  what  a  straight  line  is  actually,  one  must  draw  it  by 
an  act  of  constructive  imagination.  But  Kant  does  not  emphasize  the  truth 
that  such  drawing  of  a  straight  line  is  quite  impossible  for  a  mind  that  has  not 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  19. 


10  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT  S   PHILOSOPHY 

previously  traced  some  line,  as  seen  or  felt,  actually  limiting  a  thing  perceived 
by  the  senses.  That  is  to  say,  the  grounds  for  the  construction  of  a  straight 
line,  on  which  the  foundations  of  all  the  mathematics  of  the  geometrical  order 
and  all  the  mathematical  sciences  themselves  are  standing,  are  given  only  in 
the  cognitive  judgment  which  terminates  a  series  of  sense-perceptions.  This 
process  is  an  errvisagement  by  thinking  mind  of  the  nature  of  the  really  existent 
as  given  to  it  in  the  object  of  sense-perception.  What  is  true  of  those  processes 
that  constitute  the  actual  experiences  in  which  we  come  to  the  knowledge  of  the 
properties  of  a  straight  line,  is  true  of  all  the  experience  which  furnishes  the 
other  primary  conceptions  and  axioms  of  geometry.  As  a  science,  a  system  of 
cognitions,  it  is  not  a  mere  product  of  imagination  or  of  thought,  much  less 
of  mere  aggregated  sensations  or  of  associated  ideas.  It  is  rather  a  product  of 
the  entire  mind  in  its  actual  living  commerce  with  things.1 

In  this  "living  commerce  with  things,"  however,  the  pragmatist 
would  take  care  to  remind  us  that  the  mind  is  not  restricted  to  mere 
envisagement,  as  this  statement  of  Ladd  might  seem  to  imply.  The 
mind's  true  role  is  rather  that  of  reconstruction  than  of  envisagement. 
Both  mind  and  things  are  efficient  factors  in  the  outcome.  A  crude 
realism  would  emphasize  only  the  things,  leaving  to  mind  the  empty 
task  of  copying.  Kant  swings  to  the  other  extreme  and  seems  to 
attribute  to  mind  the  power  of  constructing  things  regardless  of  any  give 
and  take,  in  the  transformation  of  meaning  through  conflict  and  recon- 
stitution.  The  truth  is,  of  course,  that  neither  thing  nor  mind  is  alone 
the  determining  factor. 

Kant  was  powerfully  influenced  by  the  recent  development  of 
mathematical  physics  in  his  day.  He  declares:  " The  science  of  mathe- 
matics presents  the  most  brilliant  example  of  how  pure  reason  may 
enlarge  its  domain  without  the  aid  of  experience."2  Again  he  says: 
"  Since  in  any  doctrine  of  nature  only  so  much  of  real  science  is  contained 
as  there  is  knowledge  a  priori,  every  doctrine  of  nature  will  constitute 
a  real  science  only  in  so  far  as  mathematics  can  be  applied  to  it."3  In 
his  reaction  from  Hume's  skepticism  he  swung  so  far  from  the  empirical 
attitude  that  he  wanted  to  put  the  whole  process  of  knowledge,  or  as 
much  of  it  as  he  possibly  could,  into  the  mind's  constituent  forms 
themselves.  But  for  this  reaction  he  might  have  glimpsed  the  fact  that 
mathematical  science  is  as  empirical  ultimately  as  are  the  other  sciences. 
He  might  have  anticipated  John  Stuart  Mill  in  recognizing  that  mathe- 
matical judgments  have  in  the  last  analysis  an  empirical  genesis,  that 

1  Philosophy  of  Knowledge,  pp.  259,  260. 

2  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  572. 

3  Metaphysical  Elements  of  Natural  Sci.,  Preface. 


SPACE   AND   TIME  II 

"axioms  are  experimental  truths  generalized  from  observation,"  or 
better,  as  the  pragmatist  would  again  amend,  truths  reached  by  the 
mind  in  its  movement  back  and  forth  between  observation  and  ideas,  in 
the  formation  or  re-formation  of  hypotheses.  It  was  Mill's  weakness  at 
times  to  postulate  a  raw  material  of  pure  sensational  data,  forgetting  the 
important  fact  indicated  by  himself  in  other  places,  that  the  positive 
aspects  of  scientific  inquiry  require  the  assistance  of  the  mind's  hypothe- 
ses, of  ideas,  to  keep  the  "facts"  from  being  meaningless  or  inadequate. 
Mill  saw  clearly,  however,  just  in  this  connection,  that  the  idea  must 
develop  within  the  same  experience  in  which  the  facts  play  their  part. 
Kant's  confidence  that  the  steps  of  the  great  mathematicians  like 
Newton  "became  a  highway  on  which  the  latest  posterity  may  march 
with  perfect  confidence"1  might  have  been  rudely  shaken  could  he  have 
foreseen  the  efforts  of  a  non-Euclidean  geometry,  coupled  with  its 
appropriate  non-Newtonian  mechanics,  to  describe  our  world  as  exactly 
as  the  Euclidean  can  do  it.  In  the  words  of  Lobachewsky,  "We  cognize 
directly  in  nature  only  motion,  without  which  all  the  impressions  our 
senses  receive  become  impossible.  All  other  ideas,  for  example 
geometric,  though  tied  up  implicitly  in  the  properties  of  motion,  are 
artificial  products  of  our  minds;  and  consequently  space,  by  its  own 
self,  abstractly,  for  us  does  not  exist."2  If  Kant  had  been  less  cavalier 
toward  the  psychological  aspects  of  his  problem,  he  might  have  realized, 
as  have  later  thinkers,  that  geometry  arose  originally  out  of  man's 
interest  in  the  spatial  relations  of  physical  bodies  about  him,  numerous 
facts  testifying  to  its  empirical  origin ;  and  that  its  development  cannot 
be  made  intelligible  apart  from  consideration  of  these.  "The  per- 
ception of  space  as  a  continuous  whole  goes  back  to  such  empirical 
elements  as  sensations  of  movement,  sight,  touch,  the  statical  sense  of 
the  semicircular  canals,  the  power  of  orienting  the  body  with  reference 
to  presented  stimuli."3  The  unitary  conception  of  space  resulting  from 
all  these  factors  is  a  complex  phenomenon  and  is  determined  by  the 
sensory  factors  that  contribute  to  it.  This  is  evidenced  by  the  fact 
that  psychological  spaces  which  correspond  to  the  different  senses  are 
not  entirely  identical.  The  unitary  space-perception  of  a  man  blind  from 
birth  is  of  one  sort  and  that  of  one  of  unimpaired  vision  is  of  another 
sort.  Different  forms  of  geometry  have  developed  in  accordance  with 
these  differences  of  sensory  material  and  have  been  characterized  •  as 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  583. 

2  Lobachewsky,  New  Principles  of  Geometry,  p.  15  (Ed.  Bruce  Halstead). 

3  Ladd,  op.  cit.,  p.  229. 


12  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

motor,  visual,  etc.,  as  they  have  placed  chief  emphasis  on  one  or  another 
of  these  sensory  factors.  Euclid's  geometry  is  largely  motor.  Pro- 
jective  geometry  is  visual.  Moreover  these  psychological  distinctions 
have  played  no  inconsiderable  part  in  the  discussions  as  to  the  validity 
of  these  competitive  systems  of  geometry.1 

We  might  digress  at  this  point  also  to  say  that  Kant's  confidence 
in  the  growing  science  of  mathematical  physics,  the  other  field  on  which 
he  drew  for  illustrations  of  necessary  a  priori  judgments,  might  have  been 
similarly  shaken  if  the  discoveries  of  radium  and  uranium  had  occurred 
in  his  day,  and  he  would  have  been  spared  the  error — in  opposition  to 
Hume — of  getting  too  much  fixity  in  his  judgments,  even  allowing  for 
his  scrupulous  care  to  adhere  to  general  principles  and  not  to  pass  over 
to  specific  laws.  When  such  universally  accepted  rubrics  as  the  atomic 
theory  find  themselves  partly,  at  least,  discredited  by  the  advance  of 
science,  it  is  well  not  to  try  to  make  our  physics  too  mathematical.  It 
may  be  as  difficult  to  apply  mathematics  in  this  rigid  way  to  physics  as 
Locke  found  it  was  to  apply  that  science  to  ethics  and  for  just  the  same 
reason,  namely,  because  the  facts  are  not  all  in  or  because  the  facts 
actually  change.  From  the  pragmatic  or  functional  standpoint  the 
facts  in  any  science  are  only  provisionally  or  tentatively  given.  Nothing 
can  be  said  to  be  absolutely  fixed,  unless  it  be  the  fact  of  struggle, 
growth,  purposive  endeavor.  Facts  change,  or  if  this  seems  harsh  to 
the  realist  or  the  idealist,  what  seem  to  be  unquestionable  facts  actually 
change,  and  for  human  experience  this  comes  to  the  same  thing.  Truths 
are  relative  to  the  conditions,  situations,  problems  in  connection  with 
which  they  take  their  genesis  and  as  solutions  for  which  they  are  for- 
mulated. When  these  problems  and  conditions  change  so-called  truths 
are  reformulated  pari  passu  with  the  changes  or  advances.  The  so-called 
facts  and  truths  of  a  given  age  come,  therefore,  to  bear  all  the  ear-marks 
of  postulates  or  hypotheses.  With  a  forward  look  and  for  the  purpose 
they  serve  they  are  true  and  seemingly  eternally  true.  From  the  back- 
ward look  of  succeeding  ages  they  are  revalued  and  often  superseded. 
This  is  the  fact  of  history,  whatever  may  seem  to  be  the  verbal  difficulties 
in  the  appraisement  of  them  and  of  the  fact. 

But,  returning  to  Kant's  own  treatment  of  space,  we  find  that  he 
inevitably  moves  away  from  the  transcendental  to  a  functional  statement 
himself  whenever  he  approximates  the  real  value  of  this  category. 

Space  does  not  represent  any  quality  of  objects  by  themselves,  or  objects 
in  their  relation  to  one  another;  i.e.,  space  does  not  represent  any  determination 

1  Withers,  Euclid's  Parallel  Postulate. 


SPACE  AND   TIME  13 

which  is  inherent  in  the  objects  themselves,  and  would  remain,  even  if  all 
subjective  conditions  of  intuition  were  removed.  For  no  determination  of 
objects,  whether  belonging  to  them  absolutely  or  in  relation  to  others,  can 
enter  into  our  intuition  before  the  actual  existence  of  the  objects  themselves, 
that  is  to  say,  they  can  never  be  intuitions  a  priori.  It  is  therefore  from  the 
human  standpoint  only  that  we  can  speak  of  space,  extended  objects,  etc.  If 
we  drop  the  subjective  condition  under  which  alone  we  can  gain  external 
intuition,  that  is  so  far  as  we  ourselves  may  be  affected  by  objects,  the  repre- 
sentation of  space  means  nothing.  For  this  predicate  is  applied  to  objects 
only  in  so  far  as  they  appear  to  us,  and  are  objects  of  our  senses.  Our  dis- 
cussions teach,  therefore,  the  reality,  i.e.,  the  objective  validity,  of  space  with 
regard  to  all  that  can  come  to  us  externally  as  an  object,  but  likewise  the 
ideality  of  space  with  regard  to  things  when  they  are  considered  in  themselves 
by  our  reason,  and  independent  of  the  nature  of  our  senses.1 

And  since  these  independent  things  have  utterly  no  significance  for  us, 
the  meaning  of  space  is  limited  to  its  functional  use,  whatever  may  be 
true  of  its  genetic  development.  Kant  adds: 

We  maintain  the  empirical  reality  of  space,  so  far  as  every  possible  external 
experience  is  concerned,  but  at  the  same  time  its  transcendental  ideality,  that 
is  to  say,  we  maintain  that  space  is  nothing  if  we  leave  out  of  consideration  the 
conditions  of  a  possible  experience,  and  accept  it  as  something  on  which  things 
by  themselves  are  in  any  way  dependent.2 

In  these  utterances  we  have  clearly  stated  the  contradictory  elements 
of  the  functional  and  the  transcendental.  Inasmuch  as  Kant  constantly 
shows  the  futility  of  talking  about  an  object  outside  "the  conditions  of 
a  possible  experience,"  we  are  warranted  in  holding  that  the  only  really 
valuable  ingredient  in  his  whole  treatment  of  space  is  the  functional — 
that  which  pertains  to  space  "with  regard  to  all  that  can  come  to  us 
externally  as  an  object"  Even  in  the  phrase  "externally  as  an  object" 
we  have,  of  course,  an  abstraction  the  futility  of  which  Kant  is  aiming 
all  along  to  show.  He  does  not  realize  the  pitfalls  into  which  he  is 
betrayed  by  his  own  abstract  terms.  It  was  long  ago  pointed  out  that 
this  manner  of  separating  the  elements  of  "poor  sensation"  and  of 
mental  powers  is  a  work  of  mythology. 

My  space-intuitions  occur  not  in  two  times  but  in  one.  There  is  not  one 
moment  of  passive,  inextensive  sensation,  succeeded  by  another  of  active 
extensive  perception,  but  the  form  I  see  is  as  immediately  felt  as  the  color 
which  fills  it  out.  That  the  higher  parts  of  the  mind  come  in,  who  can  deny  ? 
They  add  and  subtract,  they  compare  and  measure,  they  reproduce  and 
abstract.  They  inweave  the  space-sensations  with  intellectual  relations:  but 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  pp.  20,  22.  a  Ibid. 


14  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

these  relations  are  the  same  when  they  obtain  between  the  elements  of  the 
space-system  as  when  they  obtain  between  any  of  the  other  elements  of  which 
the  world  is  made.1 

Kant's  mistake  here  as  elsewhere  in  his  "Anschauung  with  necessity"  is 
in  holding  to  a  sensation-atomism,  the  view  that  originally  a  thing  of 
sensation  is  given  in  consciousness  which  must  first  be  brought  into  an 
orderly  connection  by  the  intellect.  Yet  what  his  whole  deduction 
establishes  is  the  fact  that  in  sensation  we  have  just  one  whole  organic 
experience,  that  sensation  existing  by  itself,  apart  from  experience,  is  a 
meaningless  expression. 

It  is  worthy  of  repetition,  however,  that  Kant  removes  at  one  fell 
stroke  the  whole  structure  of  naive  realism  in  this  treatment  of  space 
and  time.  He  says:  "If  we  take  away  the  subject,  or  even  only  the 
subjective  constitution  of  our  senses  in  general,  then  not  only  the  nature 
and  relations  of  objects  in  space  and  time,  but  even  space  and  time 
themselves  disappear."2  In  the  words  of  Watson,  "Kant  rules  out  the 
doctrine  of  Newton  that  space  is  a  real  thing,  the  doctrine  of  Locke  that 
it  is  a  property  of  real  things,  and  the  doctrine  of  Leibnitz  that  it  is  a 
relation  of  real  things."3  In  amendment  of  this  the  pragmatist  would 
add  simply,  of  real  things  as  abstracted  from  our  own  mental  needs 
and  activity. 

To  recapitulate,  then,  we  find  Kant  oscillating  between  the  two  uses 
of  his  fundamental  forms  of  perception — space  and  time.  Rightly 
repudiating  an  empiricism  that  resolved  experience  into  unrelated  atoms 
leaving  in  reality  no  experience  whatever,  he  seeks  a  way  of  securing 
unity.  To  do  this  he  tninks  it  necessary  to  introduce  a  transcendental 
element — spaceless  and  timeless.  His  argument  proceeds  not  by 
introspection  but  by  formal  reasoning.  Assuming,  in  contradiction  to 
all  that  he  is  setting  himself  to  prove,  that  original  sense-elements  do 
exist  in  this  primordial  condition,  he  clamps  down  upon  them  his  tran- 
scendental forms  of  space  and  time.  He  conceives  space  as  a  unity, 
holding  unconsciously  the  mathematical  viewpoint  and  failing  to  note 
the  psychological  development  of  our  actual  space  experiences.  His 
argument  is  valid  only  if  we  concede  the  premises — the  original  unrelated 
elements.  Pragmatists  do  concede  the  fact  of  unity  but  deny  the  need 
of  the  transcendental.  Kant  himself  exposes  the  weakness  of  his 
original  assumption  in  proceeding  to  show  that  space  and  time  are  never 

1  James,  Psychology,  II,  275. 

3  Aesthetic  (Mahaffy's  trans.),  II,  59. 

3  The  Philosophy  of  Kant  Explained  (larger  work),  p.  90. 


SPACE   AND  TIME  15 

found  as  empty  concepts,  as  mere  preconditions  to  sensible  experience, 
but  as  inevitably  fast  bound  up  with  concrete  material  itself,  as  invariably 
functioning  in  situations  of  experience  which  preclude  an  abstraction  of 
sense-elements  on  one  side  and  forms  of  perception  on  the  other.  He 
does  not,  however,  reach  explicitly  the  pragmatic  insight  that  our 
starting-point  is  neither  non-temporal  nor  supra-temporal,  but  experience 
just  as  we  find  it. 


THE  MIND'S  CONSTRUCTION  OF  NATURE 

Kant's  unconscious  shifting  from  the  transcendental  to  the  functional 
runs  through  his  twofold  use  of  the  categories  in  his  "  Deduction  of  the 
Categories,"  and  his  essential  agreement  with  pragmatic  doctrine,  in  so 
far  as  he  keeps  to  the  proper  use  of  his  concepts,  comes  to  light  in  his 
teaching  of  the  mind's  determination  of  nature. 

Kant  realizes  clearly  the  difficulty  involved  in  regarding  the  work  of 
thought  as  merely  reporting,  representing,  or  pointing  at  an  external, 
fixed  reality.  It  is  precisely  this  realization  that  leads  him  to  introduce 
a  transcendental  logic,  as  over  against  the  traditional  analytic  logic  of 
the  schools.  He  wants  synthetic,  not  merely  analytic  judgments. 
With  Locke  he  feels  the  need  of  something  more  than  "  trifling  judg- 
ments." He  wants  thought  to  go  forward  and  it  cannot  move  onward 
if  its  task  is  merely  to  record  something  ready,  given.  In  accounting 
for  synthetic  a  priori  judgments,  in  the  deduction  of  his  categories,  he 
does  just  what  this  latest  movement  of  philosophic  thought  has  made 
prominent,  namely,  he  shows  that  thought  is  constructive,  that  it 
functions  in  determining  experience,  and  that  it  is  the  conditio  sine  qua 
non  for  an  orderly,  harmonious  experience.  He  declares:  "When  we 
speak  of  the  categories  being  necessary  for  our  experience,  what  do  we 
mean  by  experience?  We  mean  a  great  complex,  embracing  a  vast 
number  of  objects,  and  we  also  mean  the  legitimate  and  orderly  con- 
nection of  these  objects  into  a  great  harmony  or  unity."1 

His  very  theme  has  a  pragmatic  tone — How  is  experience  possible  ? 
He  substitutes  for  the  Greek  objects  (as  Windelband  terms  them)  given 
objects  of  which  knowledge  is  the  copy — experience,  or  what  he  calls 
phenomenal  appearance.  He  does  not  seem  to  realize  that  in  the 
phenomenal  itself  we  may  get  real  objects,  the  only  objects  that  can  be 
real  for  us,  although  this  is  implicitly  suggested  over  and  over  in  his 
thought.  Indeed  it  is  in  places  more  than  suggested.  He  does  not 
actually  oppose  "phenomenal"  to  "real."  In  refuting  idealism  he 
expressly  says  in  one  place  that  the  phenomenal  does  not  exclude  reality, 
but  from  the  pragmatic  standpoint  he  weakens  this  assertion  by  adding, 
~~-  "We  cannot  possibly  know  the  thing  by  the  senses  as  it  is  in  itself."3 
This  involves  an  assumption  that  pragmatism  does  not  make.  But  we 
are  concerned  now  to  see  his  pragmatic  concessions.  The  old  analytic 
logic,  he  says,  dealt  only  with  the  forms  of  thought.  Transcendental 

1  Prolegomena,  p.  65.  3  Ibid.,  p.  43. 

16 


THE  MIND'S  CONSTRUCTION  OF   NATURE  17 

logic  will  enable  us  to  determine  the  positive  contents  of  knowledge. 
We  want  not  merely  a  criterion  of  consistency,  we  want  a  criterion  of 
truth  itself.  We  want  not  merely  to  lay  down  the  negative  conditions 
of  knowledge  (although  this  is  what  the  limited  application  of  his 
revolution  of  thought  amounted  to  in  his  first  Critique),  but  we  want  to 
make  positive  advance  in  scientific  information.  How  pragmatic  this 
all  sounds. 

Pragmatism  and  Kantianism  agree  that  we  ourselves  help  to  make 
the  reality  which  we  know.  When  Kant  asks,  How  is  synthetic  a  priori 
knowledge  possible,  the  answer  runs  that  we  know  the  part  of  reality 
which  we  ourselves  make  out  of  pure  reason,  without  experience.  But 
he  reiterates  that  the  only  reality  we  do  make  and  know  is  experienced 
reality.  Pragmatism  defends  the  view  that  we  construct  our  reality — 
our  orderly  world — step  by  step,  starting  with  provisionally  given  facts 
and  postulating  one  hypothesis  after  another  as  ordering  principles. 
Kant  makes  no  attempt  psychologically  to  detail  the  operations  by 
means  of  which  our  thinking  builds  reality,  but  his  ground  principle 
that  we  participate  in  the  process  is  sound  pragmatic  doctrine.  At  this 
point  James  raises  a  protest:  "Superficially  this  sounds  like  Kant's 
view,  but  between  categories  fulminated  before  nature  began,  and  cate- 
gories forming  themselves  in  nature's  presence  the  whole  chasm  between 
rationalism  and  empiricism  yawns.  To  the  genuine  Kantianer,  Schiller 
will  always  be  to  Kant  as  a  satyr  to  Hyperion."1  This  expresses  what 
others  have  deemed  to  be  one  of  the  greatest  differences  between  Kant 
and  the  pragmatist.  It  overlooks,  however,  the  fact  that  Kant  is  not 
concerned  with  the  psychological  problem  of  the  genetic  origin  of  the 
categories,  but  with  the  epistemological  problem  of  their  value  and 
function  in  experience.  We  are  far  from  denying  that  it  is  precisely  a 
genetic  psychology  that  Kant  needs  in  many  places,  but  in  his  own 
justification  he  explicitly  says:  "We  are  discussing  not  the  origin  of 
experience,  but  of  that  which  lies  in  experience.  The  former  pertains  to 
empirical  psychology,  and  would  even  then  never  be  adequately  explained 
without  the  latter,  which  belongs  to  the  Kritik  of  cognition,  and  particu- 
larly of  the  understanding."2  A  little  concession  on  Kant's  part  to 
"the  origin  of  experience"  would  have  helped  him  to  be  more  dynamic, 
less  mechanical  and  structural.  It  would  have  enabled  him  to  carry 
his  Copernican  revolution  of  thought  out  to  its  legitimate  consequences, 
which  he  failed  to  do.  As  Schiller  says,  "Kant  did  not  grasp  all  that  is 
contained  in  ours — the  real  nature  of  our  knowing  not  as  a  mechanical 

1  Pragmatism,  p.  249.  3  Prolegomena,  p.  61. 


1 8  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

operation  of  pure  intellect,  but  as  a  function  motived  by  our  needs,  ends. 
He  did  not  see  that  fundamental  axioms  (like  causation)  which  he 
regarded  as  facts  of  mental  structure  originate  in  subjective  demands."1 
But,  allowing  for  this  limitation  already  discussed,  it  is  with  the  doctrine 
of  a  constructed  experience  just  the  same  that  Kant  and  we  are  here 
concerned.  Kant  sees  that  nature  does  not  prescribe  laws  to  our 
understanding,  for  in  that  case  we  should  have  only  empirical  knowledge. 
He  means  by  this  that  we  should  have  only  accidents,  fragments,  dead 
copies.  For  an  a  priori  knowledge  of  nature  our  understanding  must 
prescribe  laws  to  nature.  This  means,  to  make  use  of  trite  allusions, 
that  he  cannot  rest  satisfied  with  the  conception  of  the  mind  as  an 
empty  casket  or  a  blank  tablet  whose  sole  function  can  be  to  take  in  or 
register  what  falls  into  or  strikes  it  from  an  external  source.  That  was 
just  where  Locke  and  Hume  left  the  matter.  Mill  expressed  the  same 
reaction  when  he  later  asked,  How  can  a  series  of  impressions  know  itself 
as  a  series ?  Kant  says:  "The  understanding  creates  its  laws  not  from 
nature,  but  prescribes  them  to  it."2  Here  again  is  the  cardinal  error  of 
separating  two  aspects  of  the  knowing  process,  instead  of  treating  that 
process  as  just  one  whole  fact.  But  the  problem  had  been  transmitted 
to  Kant  in  this  form  and  our  interest  is  in  the  hints  given  of  the  functional 
use  of  the  categories.  It  is  only  to  nature  as  phenomena  or  as  a  group 
of  phenomena  that  the  mind  thus  prescribes  its  laws.  Our  understand- 
ing cannot  determine  nature  as  a  thing-in-itself  or  as  a  system  of  things- 
in-themselves.  "The  cognition  of  what  cannot  be  an  object  of  experi- 
ence would  be  hyperphysical,  and  concerning  that  the  subject  of  our 
present  discussion  has  nothing  to  say,  but  only  concerning  the  cognition 
of  nature,  the  reality  of  which  can  be  confirmed  by  experience.  Our 
inquiry  here  extends  not  to  things-in-themselves,  but  to  things  as  objects 
of  possible  experience,  and  the  complex  of  these  is  what  we  properly 
designate  as  nature."3  We  are,  therefore,  justified  in  holding  that  the 
distinction  between  phenomena  and  noumena,  while  it  constitutes  an 
obstacle  to  a  thoroughly  consistent  pragmatic  attitude,  and  shows 
Kant's  rationalistic  predilections,  is  not  logically  germane  to  the  problem 
he  is  here  discussing. 

The  tedious  repetitions  of  Kant's  own  work  are  likely  to  encumber  our 
comparative  study,  but  it  seems  necessary  to  say  that  it  would  be  idle 
to  deny  the  error  of  Kant  and  his  followers  of  the  Hegelian  school  in 
disregarding  the  psychological  aspects  of  the  categories  and  in  seeking  to 

1  Studies  in  Humanism,  p.  468. 

2  Prolegomena,  p.  36.  » Ibid.,  p.  51. 


THE  MIND'S  CONSTRUCTION  OF  NATURE  19 

remain  on  the  inner  side  of  cognitive  processes  for  a  special  theory  of 
knowledge.  The  separation  of  stuff  and  form  smacks  of  the  outworn 
theory  of  separate  soul-capacities,  as  well  as  of  sensation-atomism. 
Pragmatists  have  rightly  asked  in  what  sense  the  categories  are  a  priori 
— whether  in  a  logical  or  psychological  sense.  Schiller  has  suggested 
that  the  Kantian  categories  as  well  as  the  forms  of  perception  could  show 
their  exclusive  validity  only  if  the  truth  of  his  table  of  categories  itself 
shows  an  a  priori  necessity  of  thought.  If  empirically  they  are  verified 
before  all  others,  they  may  be  allowed  to  stand.  But  all  subsequent 
research  has  shown  just  the  opposite.  It  is  far  from  our  purpose  to  defend 
his  table  of  categories  or  the  artificial  system  of  them  and  that  is  not  the 
point.  Pragmatism  constructs  the  categories  as  well  as  the  forms  of 
space  and  time  as  psychological  facts,  that  is,  as  facts  that  do  not  contain 
a  solution  of  the  problems  of  knowledge,  but  are  themselves  the  proper 
objects  of  psychological  investigation.  It  recognizes  the  validity  of  no 
one  table  of  categories  alone.  Their  number  and  nature  must  depend 
upon  our  experience.  They  grow  out  from  human  personality  and  its 
needs  as  their  starting-point,  with  the  possibility  of  further  future  de- 
velopment. But  it  is  doubtful  if  certain  pragmatists,  in  their  considera- 
tion of  the  categories,  have  done  full  justice  to  Kant's  meaning,  have  seen 
his  essential  kinship  with  them  in  placing  himself  upon  the  phenomenal- 
istic  standpoint.  Kant  holds  that  if  nature  were  a  connection  of  real 
things,  we  could  arrive  at  a  knowledge  of  the  laws  of  this  connection  in  two 
ways  only ;  either  because  we  should  find  these  connections  in  experience 
or  because,  while  we  construct  them  out  of  our  own  forms  of  synthesis,  it 
is  so  arranged  that  we  get  a  knowledge  of  reality  itself  in  the  process. 
The  second  alternative  assumes  the  pre-established  harmony  which  Kant 
once  for  all  repudiates.  The  nature  with  which  Kant  deals  is  just  the 
sum  total  of  phenomena,  a  number  of  mental  representations  held 
together  by  the  mind's  own  laws.  To  be  sure,  in  the  background  of  his 
thought  stand  the  Dinge  an  sick  as  the  ultimate  cause  of  our  sensations, 
but  they  are  negligible  for  his  purposes  here.  The  universal  laws  of 
nature  are  really  the  laws  of  thought  which  we  discover  in  experience 
only  because  we  have  constructed  that  experience  in  accordance  with 
them.  This,  at  any  rate,  approximates  the  statement  of  our  constructive 
(and  possibly  our  purposive)  mental  activity  as  it  is  given  by  pragmatic 
thinkers.  As  to  the  first  alternative,  it  ignores  a  critical  examination  of 
what  a  connection  of  real  things  could  be  apart  from  their  entrance  into 
our  organic  life,  and  the  difficulty  is  the  seeming  implication  that  these 
real  things  might  be  found  if  we  knew  how  to  go  after  them. 


20  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT5S  PHILOSOPHY 

Pragmatists,  in  their  handling  of  postulates,  have  explained  away 
the  Kantian  criteria  for  valid  a  priori  truth — his  necessity  and  uni- 
versality. They  regard  necessity  as  simply  the  expression  of  a  need  on 
our  part.  We  need  the  postulate  and  must  have  it  as  a  means  to  our 
ends.  "If  we  make  a  demand  that  a  certain  principle  shall  hold,  we 
naturally  extend  our  demand  to  all  cases  without  distinction  of  time  past, 
present,  and  to  come."1  But  is  this  essentially  different  from  Kant's 
meaning?  His  universality  and  necessity  are  virtually  one,  for  the 
former  depends  upon  the  latter.  It  is  difficult  to  see  in  the  "a  priori 
necessity"  of  judgments  or  categories  an  import  vitally  distinct  from 
the  pragmatic  recognition  that  "no  experience  can  upset  them  because 
they  are  now  a  part  of  the  structure  of  our  mind."  Indeed,  if  we  may 
linger  here  just  a  moment,  whatever  difference  there  is  in  the  two 
statements  might  be  claimed  for  Kant's  credit,  for  while  "the  structure 
of  the  mind"  might  conceivably  be  modified  by  a  change  of  diet  or 
climate  affecting  the  nervous  mechanism,  Kant's  criteria  set  forth  the 
necessary  conditions  of  experience.  Experience  may  cease  to  be,  but  so 
long  as  we  do  business  at  all  in  the  world  of  thinking  we  shall  have  to  deal 
in  such  manner  as  to  be  understood.  Kant  presupposes  an  objective 
common  test.  Pragmatists  have  given  more  attention  to  the  supposed 
derivation  of  categories  in  the  experience  of  the  race,  but  we  have  already 
indicated  that  Kant  was  not  concerned  with  the  evolutionary  aspect 
of  them.  Again  we  concede  his  limitations.  He  does  not  pause  to 
inquire  enough  as  to  the  relative  stability  of  the  concepts  with  which 
thought  must  operate.  Professor  A.  W.  Moore  has  well  said:  "The 
certainty  of  the  categories  is  even  more  fatally  universal  than  the  tides 
or  the  eclipses."2  Kant  says  explicitly:  "So  there  arose  the  pure 
concepts  of  the  understanding,  concerning  which  I  could  make  certain 
that  these  and  this  exact  number  only  constitute  our  whole  cognition  of 
things  from  pure  understanding."3  In  working  over  his  concepts 
according  to  the  Aristotelian  tradition  he  took  his  resultant  table  much 
too  seriously.  His  reality  is  not  fluid  and  plastic  enough  for  the  prag- 
matist,  but  his  conception  of  the  relation  of  thinking  to  truth  and  reality 
leans  directly  toward  pragmatism.  While  he  held  the  conception  of 
deductive  certainty  as  the  ideal  of  science  and  was  still  burdened  with 
the  view  of  final,  unmodifiable  knowledge,  yet  we  may  recognize  the  value 

1  Schiller,  Personal  Idealism,  "Axioms  as  Postulates,"  p.  69. 
3  Pragmatism  and  Its  Critics,  p.  73. 
*  Prolegomena,  p.  85. 


THE  MIND'S  CONSTRUCTION  OF  NATURE  21 

of  his  position  for  scientific  procedure  for  all  time.  In  the  language 
of  DeLaguna: 

We  are  in  possession  of  a  number  of  very  general  principles,  to  which  we 
attribute  a  truth  that  is  not  conceived  as  open  to  correction  by  any  experience, 
inasmuch  as  all  the  particulars  of  experience  are  interpreted  in  accordance  with 
these  principles,  and  any  observation  which  apparently  contradicted  them 
would  rather  itself  be  denied  than  cause  a  modification  in  these  principles. 
These  principles  are  obviously  synthetic,  and  thus  open  to  formal  questioning, 
and  no  demonstration  of  their  truth  can  be  given;  but  they  constitute  the 
most  comprehensive  organization  of  our  experience,  and  it  is  in  this  function 
that  their  validity  consists.  The  reality  of  phenomena  in  our  experience  has 
no  further  assignable  meaning  than  their  conformity  to  these  most  general 
conditions  of  experience.1 

Schiller  gives  the  statement:  "The  a  priori  axioms  are  facts — real,  solid, 
observable,  mental  facts — and  woe  betide  the  philosopher  who  collides 
with  them.  In  one  word  they  are  psychical  facts  of  the  most  indubitable 
kind."2  Such  expressions  are  hardly  a  forced  paraphrase  of  Kant's 
statement,  if  we  are  looking  for  his  real  meaning.  There  is  every  reason 
to  believe  that  he  would  have  welcomed  Darwin's  discoveries  and  all 
the  adjustments  of  thinking  that  flow  from  them,  for  no  thinker  was 
more  hospitable  than  Kant  to  every  desirable  advance  in  scientific 
procedure. 

It  is  exceedingly  difficult,  from  our  modern  standpoint,  in  considering 
the  categories,  to  eliminate  the  genetic  and  even  the  chronological 
aspects  of  their  development  and  keep  the  attention  focused  on  their 
purely  logical  nature.  This  is  but  another  way  of  saying  that  the  lines 
of  sheer  demarkation  between  psychology,  logic,  and  epistemology  have 
broken  down.  The  whole  problem  is  one  that  essentially  involves 
psychology.  Kant  is  seeking  to  describe  what  actually  takes  place  in 
an  act  of  knowing — a  matter  of  psychological  fact.  Logic  may  then 
claim  the  task  of  evaluating  these  processes,  of  ascertaining  whether  our 
judgments  attain  the  truth  at  which  they  aim.  If  epistemology  is  to 
have  any  legitimate  field  of  its  own,  it  must  embrace  these  two  aspects, 
rather  than  assume  an  attitude  of  indifference  toward  either  of  them. 
Had  there  been  in  Kant's  day  a  body  of  genetic  psychology  and  had  he 
found  as  ready  at  hand  the  means  to  resort  to  its  aid  as  do  the  prag- 
matists,  the  kinship  between  his  purposes  and  theirs  would  be  more  easy 

1  Dogmatism  and  Evolution,  p.  213. 
3  Personal  Idealism,  p.  79. 


22  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

of  establishment  and  the  implied  functional  leaning  of  his  thought  would 
be  nearer  to  explicit  statement.  He  desired,  as  he  would  phrase  it,  to 
keep  his  Critique  clear  of  all  doubtful  opinions  regarding  the  descriptive 
and  explanatory  science  of  cognition.  Can  we  wonder  at  this  when  we 
remember  the  unsatisfactory  character  of  the  attempts  of  Locke  and 
Berkeley,  when  we  recall  particularly  Hume's  difficulties  in  reducing  the 
self  to  "nothing  but  a  bundle  of  different  perceptions,"  "all  probable 
reasoning  to  nothing  but  a  species  of  sensation,"  and  his  utter  failure  to 
account  for  what  knowledge  we  do  possess?  It  was  the  faulty  psy- 
chology of  his  predecessors  that  alienated  Kant  from  the  psychological 
standpoint.  But  he  failed  to  see  that  his  own  epistemology  involved 
those  same  faults  on  the  other  side.  Hume  left  experience,  to  borrow  a 
homely  metaphor,  as  a  tableful  of  detached  pieces  of  cloth.  Kant  put 
them  together  with  exaggerated  emphasis  upon  the  seams.  Neither  of 
them  grasped  the  truth  that  experience  is  just  one  seamless  garment,  one 
whole  within  which  the  distinctions  are  set  up  between  subject  and 
object,  between  mind  and  the  quality  which  it  perceives.  Hume's 
limitation  was  not,  as  Kant  supposed,  in  the  excess  of  his  psychology 
but  in  the  superficiality  of  his  psychology.  Kant's  effort  to  divorce  the 
theory  of  knowledge  from  a  critical  opinion  upon  questions  in  the 
psychology  of  knowledge  was  not  only  impossible  but  incompatible  with 
his  original  purpose.  To  apply  the  critical  method  to  his  naive  assump- 
tions is  only  to  follow  him  in  the  spirit,  if  it  does  seem  to  contradict 
him  in  the  letter. 

Pragmatists  would  say  that  human  knolwedge  from  the  beginning 
must  have  developed  just  in  the  way  we  now  see  it  going  forward;  or 
rather,  being  obligated  to  deal  only  with  knowledge  as  we  now  possess  it, 
they  would  imply  that,  so  far  as  reference  is  made  to  the  past,  it  must 
obviously  be  in  accordance  with  our  present  method  of  knowing.  Funda- 
mentally this  is  quite  in  harmony  with  Kant's  Critique.  It  was  precisely 
his  theme  that  if  we  think  at  all  we  must  think  in  a  certain  way,  according 
to  certain  conditions.  This  is  the  gist  of  his  whole  deduction  of  the 
categories.  It  has  long  been  a  truth  trite  to  the  student  of  Kant  that 
by  a  priori  he  did  not  mean  chronologically  a  priori.  Yet  this  fact  is 
forgotten  by  some  of  his  critics.  James  and  Schiller  have  stressed  the 
view  that  the  method  of  growth  hi  human  knowledge  from  the  earliest 
stages  of  mental  life,  from  the  first  given  stuff  of  immediate  and 
unanalyzed  consciousness — if  one  may  speak  tentatively  of  "given 
stuff" — to  an  ordered  world  of  thought  and  conduct,  has  been  the 
adoption  of  postulates.  Such  postulates  on  their  primitive  level  were 


THE   MIND'S   CONSTRUCTION   OF   NATURE  23 

scarcely  more  than  the  tentative  proving  of  new  general  perceptions, 
as  compared  with  the  conceptual  hypothesizing  of  present-day  science. 
James  gathers  the  matter  up  in  these  effective  words: 

There  is  probably  not  a  common-sense  tradition,  of  all  those  that  we  now 
live  by,  that  was  not  in  the  first  instance  a  genuine  discovery,  an  inductive 
generalization  like  those  more  recent  ones  of  the  atom,  of  inertia,  of  reflex 
action,  or  of  fitness  to  survive.  The  notions  of  one  time  and  one  space  as 
single  continuous  receptacles;  the  distinction  between  thoughts  and  things, 
matter  and  mind;  between  permanent  subjects  and  changing  attributes;  the 
conception  of  classes  with  sub-classes  within  them ;  the  separation  of  fortuitous 
from  regularly  caused  connections;  surely  all  these  were  once  definite  con- 
quests made  at  historic  dates  by  our  ancestors  in  their  attempts  to  get  the 
chaos  of  their  crude  individual  experiences  into  a  more  shareable  and  manage- 
able shape.  They  proved  of  such  sovereign  use  as  Denkmittel  that  they  are 
now  a  part  of  the  very  structure  of  our  mind.  We  cannot  play  fast  and  loose 
with  them.  No  experience  can  upset  them.  On  the  contrary,  they  apper- 
ceive  every  experience  and  assign  it  to  its  place.1 

The  categories  of  Kant  stand  on  the  same  level  with  perceptions  of 
so-called  common-sense,  with  thing,  body,  attribute,  spirit.  They  were 
set  up  as  principles  for  the  comprehension  and  organization  of  the 
immediately  given  material  of  life,  even  before  the  conception  of  a  postu- 
late or  a  hypothesis  was  abstractly  or  consciously  formulated.  Every 
new  vindication  which  a  hypothesis  found  in  experience  brought  it 
nearer  the  range  of  certain  truth.  Every  new  verification  helped  to 
harden  the  original  beliefs  into  knowledge.  These  general  perceptions 
and  categories  have  now  served  their  purpose  for  untold  generations, 
assisting  in  the  establishment  of  an  ordered  reality.  Small  wonder  that 
they  should  finally  come  to  be  regarded  as  possessions  of  pure  reason, 
independently  of  all  experience.  In  reality  the  difference  between  these 
most  certain  truths  and  the  most  daring  hypotheses  is  merely  one  of 
degree.  They  differ  not  in  the  manner  of  their  arising,  but  by  their  age, 
by  the  extent  of  their  influence  and  verification,  in  short,  by  their  working. 
Kant's  categories  like  all  others  are  a  collection  of  successful  postulates. 
They  have  been  verified  from  age  to  age  until  our  whole  speech  now 
rests  upon  them  and  we  could  hardly  think  naturally  in  any  other 
expressions. 

Accepting  this  account  as  substantially  correct,  we  believe  that  it  is 
not  far  removed  from  Kant's  own  meaning.  In  his  "Ideas  of  Reason" 
Kant  hints  at  all  this  through  his  mechanical  and  technical  terminology 
and  even  in  the  "Analytic"  itself  we  come  upon  plain  suggestions  of  the 

1  The  Meaning  of  Truth,  p.  62. 


24  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

functional  character  of  all  the  categories.  We  have  said  that  he  would 
have  profited  by  a  genetic  investigation  of  the  relation  of  thinking  to 
other  modes  of  experience  and  by  an  inquiry  into  the  specific  conditions 
under  which  thought-processes  arise.  Specific  conditions  he  disclaimed 
any  treatment  of  except  to  say  emphatically  that  definite,  specific  laws 
cannot  be  determined  by  pure  reason.  His  persistence  in  keeping  to  the 
general  conditions  has  aroused  in  some  minds  the  suspicion  that  the 
organic  and  functional  character  of  thinking  was  wholly  unappreciated 
by  him.  It  is,  however,  neither  necessary  nor  just  to  regard  his  episte- 
mology  as  an  outworn  relic  of  rationalism.  It  has  a  forward  as  well  as 
a  backward  look  and  value. 

To  summarize,  then,  Kant's  doctrine  of  nature,  before  proceeding  to 
a  more  minute  study  of  the  worth  of  his  categories,  we  have  found  him 
approximating  a  distinctively  dynamic  explanation  of  our  actual  world 
and  life.  The  mind,  with  its  forms  and  categories,  working  with  concrete 
material,  constructs  its  phenomenal  world  governed  by  its  own  laws. 
It  does  not  find  an  external  world  of  nature  to  be  merely  copied  or 
represented  by  its  ideas — thus  he  disposes  of  realism.  Nor  does  it,  on 
the  other  hand,  create  and  evolve  the  world  of  nature  out  of  its  own  pure 
activity — this  should  have  forewarned  and  prevented  the  systems  of 
pantheistic  idealism  that  offered  themselves  as  the  completion  of  his 
thought.  It  supplies  the  forms  only,  co-operating  with  an  element  from 
ultimate  things.  The  latter  is  a  residual  element  involving  an  assump- 
tion from  which  he  was  unable  to  escape.  His  approach  to  pragmatic 
attitudes  appears  in  the  fact  that  mind  does  furnish  these  constituent 
factors,  that  it  functions  in  the  upbuilding  and  systematic  ordering  of 
the  only  world  of  nature  which  it  knows  or  with  which  it  has  anything 
to  do.  Mind  and  nature  develop  from  within  experience  itself. 


THE  SCHEMATISM  OF  THE  CATEGORIES 

We  wish  to  inquire  first  if,  in  the  "Schematism  of  the  Categories,"  it 
does  not  appear  that  these  connecting  principles  of  Kant,  to  have  any 
real  significance,  are  really  functional,  limited  to  their  cash  value  in 
arranging,  correcting,  reorganizing  concrete  experience. 

The  very  fact  that  Kant  finds  it  necessary  to  ask,  "How  can  the 
categories  be  applied  to  phenomena?"  and  to  find  "some  third  thing 
homogeneous  on  the  one  side  with  the  category  and  on  the  other  side  with 
the  phenomenon,  that  renders  the  application  of  the  former  to  the  latter 
possible,"  shows  that  they  must  be  taken  functionally  to  make  sense. 
He  explicitly  says  that  the  purpose  of  the  schema  is  to  confine  the 
concept  to  its  "restricted  application."  "For  concepts  are  quite 
impossible  and  cannot  have  any  meaning  unless  there  be  an  object 
given  either  to  them,  or  at  least  to  some  of  the  elements  of  which  they 
consist,  and  they  can  never  refer  to  things-in-themselves."1  He  con- 
tinues: "These  schemata  therefore  of  the  understanding  are  the  true 
and  only  conditions  by  which  these  concepts  can  gain  a  relation  to 
objects,  that  is  a  significance."3  In  the  second  edition,  especially,  Kant 
added  some  significant  words  regarding  special  laws  that  bear  upon  our 
comparative  study,  as  indicating  the  reduction  of  the  transcendental  to 
the  functional.  He  added:  "The  pure  faculty  of  the  understanding  is 
not  competent  by  means  of  mere  categories  to  prescribe  any  a  priori  laws 
to  phenomena,  except  those  which  form  the  foundation  of  nature  in 
general,  as  a  uniform  system  of  phenomena  in  space  and  time.  Special 
laws,  inasmuch  as  they  relate  to  empirically  determined  phenomena, 
cannot  be  fully  deduced  from  pure  laws,  although  they  all  stand  in  a 
body  under  them."3  Empirical  laws,  then,  are  not  derived  from  pure 
understanding.  Empirically  given  facts  or  objects  are  required  for  the 
application  of  these  principles.  The  real  value  of  the  categories  is 
limited  to  their  scientific  employment. 

"The  schema  of  the  triangle  is  simply  a  rule  for  the  synthesis  of  the 
imagination,  in  the  determination  of  pure  figures  in  space."  That  is 
to  say,  "triangle"  is  merely  a  way  the  mind  takes  of  constructing  its 
experience  that  will  be  dependable  for  all  phenomena  requiring  treatment 
in  a  certain  way.  What  kind  of  synthesis  can  it  be  if  not  functional  ? 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  114.  a  Ibid.,  p.  119. 

J  Mahaffy's  trans.,  p.  26,  end  (ad  ed.). 

25 


26  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

We  should  have  mere  verbiage.  The  same  statement  might  be  made  of 
the  concept  of  a  tree  or  of  any  other  object.  "The  concept  of  dog  means 
a  rule  according  to  which  my  imagination  can  always  draw  a  general 
outline  of  a  four-footed  animal,  without  being  restricted  to  any  particular 
figure  supplied  by  experience."1  This  simply  means  that  general  ideas 
or  concepts  are  as  necessary  for  rational  experience  as  are  the  images  of 
particular  ideas.  They  do  not  exist  off  in  a  world  by  themselves.  Kant 
is  particularly  careful  here  to  show  that  categories  are  for  use  in  response 
to  the  highest  intellectual  need  of  our  lives,  namely,  unity.  He  says: 
"The  schema  of  a  pure  concept  is  nothing  but  the  pure  synthesis  deter- 
mined by  a  rule  of  unity.  It  amounts  to  nothing  else  but  to  the  unity 
of  the  manifold  and  therefore  indirectly  to  the  unity  of  apperception,  as 
an  active  function  corresponding  to  the  internal  sense."2  "The  categories 
are  thus  in  the  end  of  no  other  but  a  possible  empirical  use."3 

He  proceeds:  "The  schema  of  substance  is  the  permanence  of  the 
real  in  time — persisting  while  all  else  changes."  As  we  should  say,  it  is 
a  means  of  determining  what  we  can  find,  what  will  stay  put,  what  can 
be  depended  on  in  a  changing  order  or  series.  Its  application  involves 
empirical  objects  and  empirical  change.  When  Kant  undertakes  in 
another  place  the  scientific  treatment  of  matter  or  substance,  he  regards 
it,  as  did  Leibnitz,  not  as  something  dead,  inert,  but  as  energy,  force; 
he  shows  that  it  is  a  something  which  affects  our  senses.  But,  as  our 
senses  can  be  affected  only  by  motion,  immediately  we  come  to  the 
functional  determination  of  matter  as  motion.  Substance  or  matter  is 
that  which  is  movable  in  space — das  Bewegliche  in  Raume.*  This  may 
be  taken  not  unfairly  as  illustrative  of  what  Kant  means  in  his  schema- 
tism of  the  concept. 

Cause  is  a  way  of  getting  regularity  of  succession  under  conditions  of 
time.  It  is  a  conception  to  be  used  of  the  particular  objects  of  experience 
in  relation  to  each  other,  but  perfectly  meaningless  if  applied  to  experi- 
ence as  a  whole.  The  postulate  that  every  event  must  have  its  cause 
verifies  itself,  as  the  pragmatist  would  say,  in  its  successful  application 
as  an  instrument  for  controlling  the  world  of  experience.  It  serves  us 
because  we  wish  to  be  in  position  to  call  forth  or  arrest  its  influence. 
"The  concept  of  cause  implies  a  rule,  according  to  which  one  state 
follows  another  necessarily."  Kant  immediately  adds  its  hypothetical 
character  in  the  admission,  "but  experience  can  only  show  us  that  one 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  116. 
3  Ibid.,  p.  119.  s  Ibid. 

.     *  Metaphysische  Anfangsgrunde  der  Naturwissenschaft,  p.  320. 


THE   SCHEMATISM  OF   THE  CATEGORIES  2^ 

state  of  things  often,  or  at  most,  commonly  follows  another,  and  therefore 
affords  neither  strict  universality  nor  necessity."1 

In  his  treatment  of  cause  Kant  undoubtedly  took  himself  too 
seriously  in  holding  that  he  had  added  materially  to  Hume's  account. 
What  he  has  added,  and  what  brings  out  clearly  the  implied  pragmatic 
character  of  all  his  categories,  is  that  cause  must  be  hypothecated  to 
render  experience  orderly,  satisfactory — to  give  us  a  rational  world. 
Hume's  "problematical  concept,"  as  he  calls  it,  becomes  his  own  hypo- 
thetical concept  and  the  only  real  difference  is  that  he  sees  better  than 
Hume  that  the  hypothesis  must  be  held  if  we  are  to  have  an  experience  that 
will  hold  together.  It  is  simply  a  human  need  that  changes  the  judgment 
of  perception,  "If  the  sun  shines  long  enough  upon  a  body  it  grows 
warm,"  into  the  judgment  of  experience,  "The  sun  is  by  its  light  the 
cause  of  heat."  Experience  is  more  than  a  mere  aggregate  of  per- 
ceptions. It  requires  thoroughly  and  necessarily  valid  rules.  But  Kant 
forgets  at  times  wherein  consists  the  test  of  their  validity.  Yet  in  the 
same  place  quoted  from  above  he  adds  distinctly:  "I  do  not  at  all 
comprehend  the  possibility  of  a  thing  generally  as  a  cause,  because  the 
concept  of  cause  denotes  a  condition  not  at  all  belonging  to  things,  but 
to  experience."2 

Referring  again  to  space  under  this  special  chapter,  Kant  hints  that 
this  form  itself  must  be  schematized  and  seen  in  its  functional  aspects  to 
afford  meaning.  "Space  is  the  pure  image  of  all  quantities  before  the 
external  sense."  In  the  Dialectic  he  again  says:  "Space,  though  it  is 
only  a  principle  of  sensibility,  yet  serves  originally  to  make  all  forms 
possible,  there  being  only  limitations  of  it.  For  that  very  reason, 
however,  it  is  mistaken  for  something  necessary  and  independent,  nay, 
for  an  object  a  priori  existing  in  itself.  Thus  a  regulative  principle  has 
been  changed  into  a  constitutive  principle"*  We  might  add,  in  illustra- 
tion of  its  regulative  or  practical  use  and  of  the  criterion  of  its  validity, 
that  the  Euclidean  conception  of  space  and  the  corresponding  geometry 
built  upon  the  postulate  of  plane  rather  than  spherical  triangles  has  been 
held  true  and  has  to  this  day  refused  to  be  displaced  by  some  competitive 
conception  simply  because  it  has  satisfied  human  needs  or,  at  any  rate, 
men  have  thought  that  it  did.  It  enabled  the  astronomers,  for  example, 
to  calculate  with  approximate  and  satisfactory  accuracy  the  dimensions 
of  the  farthest  systems  of  suns  and  other  matters  of  scientific  interest 
involving  its  application. 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  74. 

2  Prolegomena,  p.  70.  3  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  499. 


28  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

Thus  all  the  categories  when  schematized  appear  as  rules  or  guides 
to  practical  conduct.  They  have  what  the  pragmatist  would  call  a 
purely  instrumental  character.  What  other  "deduction"  have  they? 
In  the  schematism,  says  Kant,  thought  moves  under  the  conditions  of 
time.  When  does  thought  ever  move  outside  of  these  conditions? 
Kant's  concepts  are  constitutive  only  when  he  gets  out  of  time  and 
"rides  his  high  horse."  When  applied  practically  they  all  reduce  to 
dependability.  Watson,  in  his  later  work,  gathers  the  matter  up 
admirably: 

Examination  shows  that  the  limitation  of  the  categories  to  objects  of 
sensible  experience  applies  to  every  one  of  them.  It  is  not  possible  to  give  a 
real  definition  of  any  category,  or  a  single  principle  of  the  understanding, 
without  schematizing  it.  The  principle  of  substance,  taken  by  itself,  is  merely 
the  conception  of  that  which  is  always  subject  and  never  predicate;  but  we 
have  no  possible  knowledge  of  any  actual  object  conforming  to  this  definition 
except  an  object  that  is  presented  to  us  as  that  which,  in  contrast  to  its  chan- 
ging accidents,  is  permanent  in  time.  The  categories,  then,  in  every  case  are 
limited  to  phenomena.1 

We  shall  see  later  that  in  the  "Transcendental  Dialectic"  Kant 
really  justifies  the  ideas  of  reason,  even  those  which  are  demonstrated 
to  have  no  value  as  purely  speculative  concepts,  by  the  extension  and 
application  of  this  schematism.  He  virtually  deduces  them  all  as  he 
deduces  his  main  concepts — substance  and  causality. 

Kant's  things-in-themselves  deserve  examination  in  a  separate 
chapter,  but  so  far  as  the  schematism  of  the  categories  is  concerned  the 
matter  may  be  disposed  of  by  saying  with  Paulsen  that  Kant  really  has 
two  tables  of  categories — "a  pure  conceptual  one,  and  one  reduced  to 
sensuous  terms;  a  purely  logical,  and  a  table  of  real  categories."3  The 
significant  fact  that  we  are  stressing  is  that  only  the  table  of  functional 
categories  has  any  validity  for  the  world  as  we  know  it,  for  actual  experi- 
ence. Kant  does  unmistakably  shift  from  one  table  to  the  other  and 
does  apply  them  to  things-in-themselves.  Yet  again  and  again  he  comes 
back  to  their  true  practical  use,  and  no  one  could  state  more  forcefully 
than  he  the  futility  of  any  but  functional  categories.  Under  the 
"Discipline  of  Pure  Reason"  he  summarizes  the  whole  matter  in  these 
pragmatic  words: 

As  we  cannot  form  the  least  conception  of  the  possibility  of  a  dynamical 
connection  a  priori,  and  as  the  categories  of  the  pure  understanding  are  not 

1  The  Philosophy  of  Kant  Explained  (later  work),  p.  222. 
3  Immanuel  Kant,  p.  184. 


THE   SCHEMATISM   OF   THE   CATEGORIES  29 

intended  to  invent  any  such  connection,  but  only,  when  it  is  given  in  experience, 
to  understand  it,  we  cannot  by  means  of  these  categories  invent  one  single 
object  as  endowed  with  a  new  quality  not  found  in  experience,  or  base  any 
permissible  hypothesis  on  such  a  quality;  otherwise  we  should  be  supplying 
our  reason  with  empty  chimeras,  and  not  with  concepts  of  things.  Thus  it  is 
not  permissible  to  invent  any  new  and  original  powers  as,  for  instance,  an 
understanding  capable  of  perceiving  objects  without  the  aid  of  the  senses,  or  a 
force  of  attraction  without  any  contact,  a  new  kind  of  substance  that  should 
exist,  for  instance,  in  space,  without  being  impenetrable,  and  consequently, 
also,  any  connection  of  substances  different  from  that  which  is  supplied  by 
experience;  no  presence  except  in  space,  no  duration  except  in  time.  In  one 
word,  our  reason  can  only  use  the  conditions  of  possible  experience  as  the 
conditions  of  the  possibility  of  things;  it  cannot  invent  them  independently, 
because  such  concepts,  although  not  self-contradictory,  would  always  be 
without  an  object.1 

Pragmatism  would  correct  this  statement  only  in  the  direction  of 
recognizing  unambiguously  the  dynamic  use  of  concepts.  It  is  evident 
that  by  a  dynamical  connection  a  priori  Kant  is  harboring  his  delusion  as 
to  possible  intelligible  conditions  as  contrasted  with  phenomenal,  is  still 
separating  matter  and  form,  not  realizing  that  the  word  dynamical 
would  admirably  characterize  just  the  actual  work  of  his  categories  as 
he  here  describes  or  hints  at  it.  Kant  has  felt  the  futility  of  this  dis- 
tinction all  along  in  trying  to  bridge  the  gap  with  a  third  term.  What 
he  failed  to  see  is  the  fact  that  there  is  no  gap  to  be  bridged,  there  is  no 
such  thing  as  possible  datum  outside  of  meaning,  of  thought;  what 
really  exists  is  just  the  whole  experience.  From  the  phenomenal  side, 
however,  his  statement  makes  crystal  clear  the  use  of  his  concepts  within 
the  process  of  getting  knowledge  or  experience  as  we  have  it,  and  that 
by  no  possibility  can  they  be  stretched  to  apply  to  outside  objects. 

In  Kant's  constant  mania  for  schematizing,  therefore,  in  the  immedi- 
ate necessity  which  he  feels  to  apply  his  categories,  to  find  a  bond  of 
connection  between  them  and  phenomena,  we  have  a  virtual  recognition 
of  the  meaningless  character  of  purely  logical  categories.  As  Paulsen 
says,  "All  kinds  of  devices  and  padding  were  invented  to  fill  out  the 
vacant  places  of  the  a  priori  scheme."2  His  schematism  practically 
means  the  reduction  of  his  categories  to  terms  of  sense.  It  is  instructive, 
for  our  purposes,  to  notice  how  he  is  forced  over  into  the  actual  functional 
work  and  worth  of  our  mental  concepts  even  when  his  object  is  to 
remain  on  the  inner  side  of  mental  life.  The  schematism  is  supposed  by 

3  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  618. 
1  Immanuel  Kant,  p.  71. 


30  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

him  to  be  "an  art  hidden  away  in  the  depths  of  the  human  soul,  the 
secret  of  which  we  need  not  hope  to  drag  forth  to  the  light  of  day."1  It 
is  introduced  at  first  to  show  how  a  factor  of  "pure  a  priori  imagination" 
unites  with  an  empirical  factor  in  the  application  of  our  understanding  to 
phenomena.  In  the  actual  outcome,  however,  this  "hidden  art" 
becomes  a  way  of  filling  up  empty  concepts  with  real  meaning.  The 
various  schemata  are  virtually  "belated  definitions"  of  logical  forms 
when  they  are  no  longer  pure  but  really  instrumental  for  experience, 
when  they  have  some  real  work  to  do.  In  all  of  this  Kant  treats  his 
transcendental  elements  not  as  antecedent  to,  contrasted  with,  or 
actually  separable  from,  the  functional,  but  merely  as  subphases  or 
factors  in  the  functional  process  itself.  Any  real  demarkation  between 
the  two  aspects  fades  out  in  their  application. 

1  Watson,  Selections,  p.  87. 


THE  REGULATIVE  USE  OF  REASON— THE  ANTINOMIES 

In  Kant's  treatment  of  the  regulative  use  of  the  ideas  of  reason  and 
in  the  section  of  the  "Transcendental  Dialectic"  leading  up  to  these  we 
come  into  close  relations  with  the  pragmatic  doctrine  of  the  notion  of 
truth  and  the  nature  of  truth. 

From  the  very  beginning  of  the  pragmatic  movement  the  similarity 
of  Kant's  postulates  of  the  practical  reason  for  moral  and  religious  ends 
to  certain  features  of  the  pragmatic  attitude  has  been  noted,  but  it  has 
not  always  been  observed  that  in  the  "  Dialectic"  of  the  Critique  of  Pure 
Reason  itself  Kant  gives  a  relatively  exhaustive  consideration  to  the 
postulates  or  hypotheses  of  pure  reason  for  scientific  purposes,  and 
further  that  he  treats  the  ideas  of  reason  with  a  full  appreciation  of  their 
teleological  bearings,  or,  as  the  pragmatist  would  phrase  it,  with  a 
realization  of  the  purposive  character  of  all  human  thinking. 

We  may  not,  of  course,  in  strict  accord  with  pragmatic  ways  of 
thought  and  expression,  recognize  any  clear  distinction  between  theo- 
retical and  practical  reason;  yet  Kant's  frequent  resort  to  these  anti- 
thetic terms  makes  it  difficult  to  discuss  his  system  without  them.  We 
are  reminded,  too,  in  this  pragmatic  comparison,  of  Professor  Lovejoy's 
contention  that  there  are  thirteen  different  types  of  pragmatism;  yet,  as 
it  is  true  that  psychologists  of  all  shades  are  agreed  as  to  the  main  topics 
to  be  treated  by  that  science,  just  so  may  we  indulge  the  hope  that 
pragmatic  thinkers,  fairly  understood,  are  not  seriously  at  variance  as  to 
their  main  tenets. 

Pragmatism  has  no  trouble  with  the  right  of  practical  reason  in 
holding  as  true  that  which  verifies  itself  in  practical  consequences;  that 
which  aids  in  the  construction  of  a  world-whole  in  which  our  feeling  and 
active  being  are  harmonized;  or  if  not  a  world- whole,  specific  wholes  to 
meet  specific  problems,  for  pragmatism  is  not  as  much  concerned  with 
the  problem  of  a  world-whole  as  are  idealistic  schemes  of  thought.  The 
theoretical  reason  also  might  be  conceded  the  right  to  hold  as  true  that 
which  enables  the  intellect  to  govern  its  ordered  world.  James  says: 
"Ideas  become  true  just  in  so  far  as  they  help  us  to  get  into  satisfactory 
relations  with  other  parts  of  experience,  to  summarize  them  and  get 
about  among  them  by  conceptual  short  cuts  instead  of  following  the 
interminable  succession  of  particular  phenomena."1  If  we  accept  the 

1  Pragmatism,  p.  58. 


32  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

definition  of  truth  which  makes  it  that  which  works  in  its  practical 
consequences,  the  theoretical  and  practical  reason  would  seem  to  reduce 
to  the  same  footing,  and  this  is  virtually  the  outcome  of  Kant's  treatment 
of  his  "Ideas  of  Reason." 

The  critics  of  pragmatism  have  thought  that  there  is  a  profound 
difference  between  the  two.  Practical  reason,  they  would  say,  may  claim 
the  right,  in  questions  that  cannot  be  settled  on  intellectual  grounds, 
to  assist  in  bringing  about  a  solution  by  practical  belief,  hypothe- 
sis. But  the  case  is  different  when  we  are  dealing  with  objective  facts 
or  realities  the  truth  of  which  does  not  depend  on  our  attitude  of  faith. 
Here  we  move  upon  purely  intellectual  grounds,  in  the  realm  of  the 
theoretical  reason.  Here  the  intellect  ignores  the  interests  of  free  will 
and  the  field  is  closed  to  voluntary  hypotheses.  This  statement  would 
probably  stand  from  the  viewpoint  of  either  the  realist  or  the  idealist. 

Now  it  should  be  noted  in  passing  that  James  nowhere  maintains 
that  any  sort  of  satisfactoriness  suffices  to  establish  the  truth  of  a  propo- 
sition, and  that  in  this  connection  he  is  dealing  with  cases  where  all 
theoretic  signs  fail  and  where  the  will-to-believe  is  invoked  as  an  unavoid- 
able substitute.  He  definitely  expresses  himself  to  this  effect  in  a  letter 
to  a  German  contemporary1  as  well  as  in  other  places.  But  James  and 
other  pragmatists  do  contend  that  the  intellect — even  theoretical 
intellect — is  made  up  of  practical  interests,  and  therefore  that  the  word 
theoretical  in  this  sharp  sense  is  a  misnomer.  This  is  practically  what  is 
meant  by  the  "instrumental"  view  of  truth  taught  by  Dewey  and  Moore 
at  Chicago  and  promulgated  by  Schiller  from  Oxford.  James  says: 

It  is  far  too  little  recognized  how  entirely  the  intellect  is  built  up  of  practical 
interests.  The  theory  of  evolution  is  beginning  to  do  good  service  in  its 
reduction  of  all  mentality  to  the  type  of  reflex  action.  Cognition,  in  this  view, 
is  but  a  fleeting  moment,  a  cross-section  at  a  certain  point,  of  what  in  its 
totality  is  a  motor  phenomenon.  In  the  lower  forms  of  life  no  one  will  pretend 
that  cognition  is  anything  more  than  a  guide  to  appropriate  action.  The 
germinal  question  concerning  things  brought  for  the  first  time  before  con- 
sciousness is  not  the  theoretical,  "What  is  that  ?"  but  the  practical,  "Who  goes 
there?"  or  rather,  as  Horwicz  has  admirably  put  it,  "What  is  to  be  done — 
Was  fang  ich  an?'1  In  all  our  discussions  about  the  intelligence  of  lower 
animals,  the  only  test  we  use  is  that  of  their  acting,  as  if  for  a  purpose. 
Cognition,  in  short,  is  incomplete  until  discharged  in  act."2 

Many  of  the  grotesque  interpretations  or  misinterpretations  of  the 
pragmatic  definition  of  truth  would  have  been  spared  us  if  its  critics  had 
1  Kant  Studien,  XIV,  24. 
8  Will-to-Believe,  p.  85. 


THE   REGULATIVE   USE   OF   REASON — THE   ANTINOMIES  33 

grasped  fully  the  fact  that  pragmatism  does  not  designate  as  true 
whatever  is  useful  to  our  practical  interests  in  the  daily  sense  of  the  word. 
Says  James  again: 

The  unwillingness  of  some  of  our  critics  to  read  any  but  the  silliest  of 
possible  meanings  into  our  statements  is  as  discreditable  to  their  imaginations 
as  anything  I  know  in  recent  philosophical  history.  Schiller  says  the  true  is 
that  which  works.  Thereupon  he  is  treated  as  one  who  limits  verification  to 
the  lowest  material  utilities.  Dewey  says  truth  is  that  which  gives  satisfaction. 
He  is  treated  as  one  who  believes  in  calling  anything  true  which,  if  it  were  true, 
would  be  pleasant.1 

Pragmatic  doctrine  is  that  the  worth  of  a  scientific  hypothesis  consists 
in  most,  if  not  in  all  cases,  in  its  usefulness  in  striving  for  an  ever-greater 
simplification  and  unity  of  our  world  of  experience  in  all  of  its  aspects, 
or  where  that  unity  has  been  destroyed  by  new  complications  and 
differentiations,  to  overcome  the  destructive  conflict  and  proceed  by  a 
better  method  of  organization  and  control.  Now  with  this  let  us 
compare  Kant's  explicit  declaration  that  "all  interest  is  at  last  practical 
and  what  the  speculative  reason  itself  postulates  is  completed  only  in 
practical  use."2  The  atomic  theory,  to  resume  a  former  illustration, 
long  cherished  as  indubitable  scientific  truth,  was  true  in  so  far  as  it 
offered  a  workable  basis  for  simplifying  and  understanding  a  mass  of 
facts.  Now  that  we  have  more  facts,  or  facts  of  a  different  kind,  we  need 
a  modification  of  that  theory  to  restore  satisfaction.  In  Dewey's 
decisive  words,  "In  every  scientific  inquiry  there  has  been  relegation  of 
accepted  meanings  to  the  limbo  of  mere  ideas ;  there  has  been  a  passage 
of  some  of  the  accepted  facts  to  the  region  of  mere  hypothesis  and 
opinion.  Conversely  there  has  been  a  continued  issuing  of  ideas  from 
the  region  of  hypotheses  and  theories  into  that  of  facts,  of  accepted  and 
meaningful  contents."3  Now,  the  faithful  expositor  of  Kant  may 
contend  that,  while  this  is  good  rebuttal  for  the  realist  or  the  idealist,  as 
correcting  static  inclinations,  it  does  not  touch  Kant's  fundamental 
positions.  Any  suggested  need  of  evolution  in  his  principles  is  from 
the  mark,  for  modern  discoveries  in  biological  and  physical  science — 
radium,  electrons,  or  what  not — in  no  wise  discredit  or  weaken  the  laws 
of  experience  as  he  laid  them  down.  He  was  careful  to  say  that  only  the 
general  conditions  of  experience  are  to  be  regarded  as  a  priori.  The 
uncompromising  Kantianer  may  hold  that  Kant  was  merely  dealing 

1  Pragmatism,  p.  234. 

2  Critique  of  Practical  Reason,  Dialectic,  II,  3  am.  Ende  (Mahaffy). 
«  Studies  in  Logical  Theory,  p.  12. 


34  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

with  the  common  necessity  of  connecting  experience  by  cause  and  effect, 
of  making  a  necessary  distinction  between  substance  and  states  so  that 
we  may  think  of  something  as  changing  without  being  involved  in  utter 
discontinuity;  that  whatever  be  the  more  particular  problems  with 
which  he  made  no  pretense  of  dealing,  the  same  quality  of  necessity 
attaches  to  his  general  principles  today  as  was  clearly  seen  by  him  to 
belong  to  them  at  that  time.  If  this  contention  be  true,  Kant  is  even 
more  consistent  with  modern  pragmatism  than  we  had  hoped  to  show. 
We  have  conceded  the  great  value  of  these  general  principles,  but  it 
would  seem,  from  the  functional  standpoint,  that  he  was  too  much 
hemmed  in  by  a  mechanical  conception  of  the  world  in  entertaining  the 
belief  that  for  scientific  unity  and  coherence  certain  concepts  could  be 
specified  once  for  all,  with  no  possibility  of  future  questioning.  As 
Paulsen  has  suggested,  it  is  not  quite  inconceivable  that  there  might  be 
a  future  metamorphosis  of  the  forms  of  perception  and  thought.  Kant 
was,  however,  essentially  correct  in  affirming  that  the  demand  for  unity 
and  continuity  lies  at  the  base  of  all  the  forms  and  ideas  by  which  we 
aim  to  understand  nature  and  the  world.  We  believe  that  his  whole 
statement  of  the  regulative  ideas  of  reason  accords  with  the  functional 
conception  of  the  nature  of  truth  in  the  domain  of  scientific  thought  and 
investigation  as  well  as  for  moral  and  religious  ends. 

Here  again  it  is  significant  that  in  his  contrast  of  constitutive  and 
regulative  principles  of  reason  the  only  principles  dogmatically  assumed 
as  constitutive  are  the  mathematical.  His  effort  is  to  conceive  of  others 
after  the  analogy  of  these,  never  suspecting  that  mathematics  is  as 
empirical  as  biology.  Now  it  is  true  that  in  mathematics  we  do  proceed 
to  a  greater  extent  upon  our  own  hypotheses  than  in  biology,  yet,  as  we 
have  seen,  geometry  implies  space,  and  space  implies  an  arrangement  of 
sense-perceptions.  Once  over  this  difficulty,  however,  Kant,  in  his 
treatment  of  the  antinomies,  reveals  the  instrumental  character  of  the 
principles  of  reason.  The  whole  difficulty  is  shown  to  arise  from  the 
attempt  to  apply  concepts  that  are  limited  to  experience,  to  a  world  of 
ultimate  things — to  hypostasize  them.  At  this  point  again  the  gap 
exists  between  him  and  the  pragmatist,  the  latter  having  no  ultimate 
objects  standing  off  there  in  a  region  by  themselves.  We  do  not  seek  to 
make  Kant  more  modern  or  self-consistent  than  he  is.  These  are  due 
to  his  retention  of  assumptions.  Yet,  for  logical  purposes,  these  ultimate 
things  are  not  an  essential  feature  and  they  do  not  prevent  him  from 
elucidating  the  functional  nature  of  his  principles  of  reason:  "Now  it 
has  been  clearly  enough  shown  that  the  principle  of  reason  is  not  a  con- 


THE  REGULATIVE  USE  OF  REASON — THE  ANTINOMIES  35 

stitutive  principle  of  objects  in  themselves  but  is  merely  a  rule  for  the 
continuation  and  extension  of  a  possible  experience.  If  we  keep  this 
steadily  before  our  eyes,  the  conflict  of  reason  with  itself  is  at  an  end."1 
Again,  "  Everything  in  the  world  of  sense  has  an  empirically  conditioned 
existence  and  no  property  of  a  sensible  object  has  unconditioned  neces- 
sity."2 He  shows  that  a  metaphysic  of  that  which  cannot  be  experienced 
is  impossible.  In  his  discussion  of  the  antinomies  he  indicates  that  the 
old  mistake  of  Zeno's  puzzles  is  repeated — the  mistake  of  taking  concepts 
in  two  different  connotations.  But  he  fails  to  see,  after  all,  that  he 
repeats  the  same  old  error  himself  in  admitting  by  implication  "objects 
beyond  experience."  He  does  not  realize  the  uselessness  of  not  limiting 
reality  to  the  first  and  proper  use  of  the  categories. 

With  tedious  detail  and  reduplication  he  shows  that  the  cosmological 
ideas  are  fruitlessly  making  their  dialectical  play  because  "they  do  not 
even  admit  of  any  adequate  object  being  supplied  to  them  in  any  possible 
experience,  not  even  of  reason  treating  them  in  accordance  with  the 
general  laws  of  experience."3  "Nevertheless,"  he  says,  "these  ideas  are 
not  arbitrary  fictions,  but  reason  in  the  continuous  progress  of  empirical 
synthesis  is  necessarily  led  on  to  them."4  That  is  to  say,  even  ideas  that 
are  not  scientifically  valid  are  adopted  or  develop  precisely  out  of  certain 
inevitable  problems.  What  then  constitutes  the  difference  between 
them  and  ideas  that  are  valid  ?  Just  the  fact  that  they  lack  objects  or 
experiences  to  verify  them.  Other  ideas  of  reason,  he  proceeds  to  show, 
do  have  a  certain  verification. 

Kant  is  concerned  in  this  section  as  throughout  his  system  that 
empiricism  itself  shall  not  become  dogmatic,  any  more  than  rationalism, 
and  assume  to  "boldly  deny  what  goes  beyond  the  sphere  of  its  intuitive 
knowledge."5  We  are  not  to  be  deprived  of  our  "intellectual  presump- 
tions or  of  our  faith  in  their  influence  upon  our  practical  interests."6 
How  similar  this  is  in  sound  to  the  will-to-believe.  Such  intellectual 
presumptions  and  faith  must  not,  however,  take  "the  pompous  titles  of 
science  and  rational  insight,  because  true  speculative  knowledge  can  never 
have  any  other  object  but  experience."7  Could  anything  more  be 
needed  to  show  that  Kant  realized  the  practical  and  purposive  character 
of  mental  activity  ?  He  removes  knowledge  (false  knowledge)  to  save 
belief  (belief  that  has  significance  for  practical  ends).  Why  does  Kant 

1  Watson,  Selections,  p.  173. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  193.  s  Ibid.,  p.  386. 

3  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  379.  6  Ibid.,  p.  385. 
« 1bid.  1 1bid. 


36  PRAGMATIC   ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

so  laboriously  examine  these  "transcendental  problems  of  pure  reason" 
and  why  is  it  absolutely  necessary  that  we  find  their  solution  ?  Precisely 
in  the  interest  of  scientific  and  moral  progress,  that  man  may  not  oscillate 
constantly  from  one  side  to  the  other  of  opposed  meanings  or  doctrines, 
but  may  have  a  definite  criterion  for  the  retention  and  use  of  these  ideas. 
And  what  is  that  criterion  as  Kant  here  develops  it?  It  is  just  the 
workableness  of  ideas  for  human  satisfaction — ideas,  let  us  observe,  that 
are  not  dialectically  subjected  to  or  subject  to  contradiction  by  being 
stretched  beyond  their  true  functional  application.  That  application  is 
established  by  their  critical  examination  and  the  careful  elimination  of 
all  ideas  that  have  no  objects  of  experience,  with  yet  a  tolerant  word  in 
excuse  of  even  invalid  ideas  that  spring  up  as  supposed — falsely  supposed 
— solutions  of  problems. 

Incidentally,  in  this  section,  Kant  seems  to  sustain  the  pragmatist  as 
over  against  the  realist  and  possibly  as  against  the  absolutist.  He  says: 

The  objects  of  experience  are  therefore  never  given  by  themselves,  but  in 
our  experience  only,  and  do  not  exist  outside  it.  That  there  may  be  inhabitants 
in  the  moon,  though  no  man  has  ever  seen  them,  must  be  admitted  [living  today 
it  would  be  Mars] ;  but  it  means  no  more  than  that  in  the  possible  progress  of 
our  experience,  we  may  meet  with  them;  for  everything  is  real  that  hangs 
together  with  a  perception,  according  to  the  laws  of  empirical  progress.  They 
are  therefore  real  if  they  are  empirically  connected  with  any  real  consciousness, 
although  they  are  not  therefore  real  by  themselves;  that  is,  apart  from  that 
progress  of  experience.1 

Dewey  might  well  have  used  this  as  illustrative  of  his  "present  as 
absent"  or  "experienced  as  absent,"  of  the  fact  that  the  contrast  of 
present  and  absent  or  present  and  past  must  itself  fall  within  experience. 
Where  else  can  it  fall  ?  It  is  noticeable  also  that  Kant  does  not  explain 
the  possible  existence  of  moon-dwellers  as  existence  for  the  absolute 
consciousness.  How  is  it  likely  that  he  would  deal  with  such  facts  as  the 
glacial  epoch  ?  Would  he  not  seem  to  agree  with  D.  L.  Murray  that — 

we  mean  only  that  our  experience  is  such  now  that  it  is  best  explained  by  a 
belief  (pragmatically  confirmed  in  every  moment  of  our  lives)  that  reality  has 
had  a  history  and  that  a  glacial  epoch  occurred  in  that  history.  This  painful 
experience  therefore  would  presumably  have  been  ours,  had  we  entered  into 
the  world-process  at  that  stage,  and  this  whole  history  is  so  essentially  knit  up 
with  the  reality  of  our  present  world,  that  it  is  as  real  as  it  and  as  real  as  we.a 

It  cannot  be  ignored  that  Kant,  in  his  teaching  of  empirical  realism 
and  transcendental  idealism,  does  give  unconsciously  two  totally  distinct 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  402.  *  "Pragmatic  Realism,"  Mind,  XXXIV,  385. 


THE  REGULATIVE   USE   OF   REASON — THE   ANTINOMIES  37 

definitions.  In  places  he  does  plainly  intimate  that  the  phenomenally 
real  is  that  which  corresponds  to  the  matter  of  our  sense-perceptions  or  to 
our  sensations.  This  would  give  some  support  to  realism,  for  that 
which  merely  corresponds  to  our  sensations  may  be  distinct  from  them 
and  does  not  necessarily  cease  to  exist  when  it  is  not  sensibly  perceived. 
But  in  the  sixth  section  of  the  Dialectic  he  holds  consistently  that  the 
phenomenally  real  is  the  matter  of  our  sense-perceptions  or  simply  our 
sensations  themselves.  As  for  distant  objects  or  past  events,  they  are 
phenomenally  real  because  of  a  possible  connection  between  them  and 
our  present  experience,  because  they  would  be  or  could  be  experienced 
under  proper  conditions.  This  is  good  pragmatic  doctrine  as  against 
the  realist.  There  remain  those  ultimate  objects,  but  we  may  reiterate 
that  they  are  meaningless  for  the  problem  Kant  is  here  discussing.  They 
are  not  the  objects  that  realism  itself  would  recognize  in  this  connection 
at  any  rate.  Throughout  this  section  Kant  refuses  to  separate  subject 
from  object,  datum  from  meaning. 

Forced  to  classify  Kant  just  here,  we  might,  then,  say  that  he  is 
neither  a  realist  nor  an  idealist.  He  deals  with  objects,  reals,  which  are 
neither  independent  Din%e  an  sick  nor  yet  subjective  ideas.  It  is  sig- 
nificant how  modernly  scientific  is  his  attitude  toward  these  objects  of 
possible  experience.  He  treats  them  as  do  the  natural  sciences — neither 
realistically  nor  idealistically,  but  just  as  objects  dependent  upon  the 
constitution  of  our  experience  itself.  He  says  once  more: 

Perception  which  gives  to  a  concept  its  material  embodiment,  is  the  only 
test  of  actuality.  But  we  can,  nevertheless,  in  advance  of  the  perception  of  an 
object,  and  consequently  in  a  relatively  a  priori  fashion,  know  the  existence  of 
the  object  in  case  the  thing  in  question  is  connected  with  any  of  our  per- 
ceptions according  to  the  principle  of  the  empirical  synthesis  of  phenomena. 
For  then  the  existence  of  the  thing  is  linked  with  our  percepts  in  a  possible 
experience,  and  by  virtue  of  our  general  principles  we  can  pass  from  our  actual 
perception  to  the  thing  in  question  by  a  series  of  possible  experiences.  Thus 
we  may  recognize  the  existence  of  a  magnetic  substance  pervading  all  matter, 
by  virtue  of  our  perception  of  the  magnetic  attraction  of  iron,  although  our 
immediate  perception  of  the  magnetic  matter  is  impossible  for  us  in  consequence 
of  the  constitution  of  our  sense  organs.  For  in  consequence  of  the  laws  of 
sensation  and  of  the  context  of  our  perceptions,  we  should  come  directly  to 
observe  the  magnetic  matter  were  our  organs  fine  enough.  But  the  form  of 
our  possible  experience  has  no  dependence  on  the  mere  coarseness  of  our  actual 
sense  organs.  And  thus,  just  so  far  as  perception  and  its  supplementation  by 
virtue  of  our  empirical  laws  together  suffice,  so  far  extends  our  knowledge  of 
the  existence  of  things.  But  unless  we  begin  with  actual  experience,  and 


38  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

unless  we  proceed  according  to  the  laws  of  the  empirical  connection  in  experi- 
ence, we  vainly  seek  to  guess  or  to  investigate  the  existence  of  anything.1 

The  pragmatist  could  ask  no  more  forceful  statement  than  this  of  his 
fundamental  proposition  that  all  facts,  truths,  existences  must  ulti- 
mately be  experiential,  using  the  term  experience  in  all  its  organic 
implications;  that  experience  itself  is  our  datum  and  our  only  datum; 
that  non-temporal  units  are  a  fiction ;  that  in  our  effort  to  give  a  coherent 
account  of  the  reality  of  a  thing,  or  of  the  truth  of  a  thing,  we  can  go  no 
farther  than  to  state  how  far  we  can  use  it,  what  we  can  do  with  it,  what 
it  means  for  us;  that  so  far  as  a  thing  is  socialized  we  call  it  an  object  of 
knowledge;  that  the  real  for  us  is  just  what  we  find  it  to  be.  Was 
fruchtbar  ist,  allein  ist  wahr. 

1  Mahaffy,  ad  ed.,  p.  273. 


THE  IDEAL  OF  REASON 

In  the  section  on  the  "Ideal  of  Reason"  particularly  the  conception 
of  postulating  is  handled  in  a  manner  pretty  faithfully  pragmatic,  and 
the  argument  is  not  weakened  by  his  shifting  from  appearance  to  mean- 
ingless things-in-themselves  as  in  the  discussion  of  the  antinomies 
preceding.  Our  concern  now  is  to  see  the  role  that  postulates  play  for 
scientific  purposes,  in  our  everyday  workaday  world.  The  point  is  to 
see  whether  he  does  not  recognize  the  purposive,  instrumental  character 
of  our  thinking.  It  is  not  merely  that  we  can  have  no  ideal  moral  world 
without  certain  postulates,  but  that  we  can  have  no  kind  of  world  without 
them,  and  that  the  verification  of  these  ideas  or  postulates  consists  pre- 
cisely in  the  fact  that  we  must  have  them  to  make  understandable  and 
worth  while  the  actual  world  in  which  we  live.  Kant  practically 
reminds  us  that  we  have  certain  ideas,  purposes,  relations — not  merely 
in  a  moral  sense,  but  in  a  scientific  sense.  Our  world  of  daily  thought 
and  transaction  holds  together  because  it  includes  these.  So  much  is 
fact.  He  is  as  certain  of  this  as  he  was  of  the  existence  of  mathematics 
and  physics  as  bodies  of  knowledge.  Hence  these  ideas  are  justified, 
vindicated.  This  is  a  not  unjust  paraphrase  and  summary  of  the 
entire  section. 

Incidentally,  again,  Kant  here  differentiates  his  system  from  idealism, 
as  the  latter  follows  the  tradition  of  Plato.  He  says  emphatically: 
"Reason  can  give  us  none  but  pragmatic  laws  of  free  action  for  the 
attainment  of  the  objects  recommended  to  us  by  the  senses,  and  never 
pure  laws  determined  entirely  a  priori."1  With  this  should  be  taken  an 
earlier  utterance  to  the  same  point:  "What  to  us  is  an  ideal  was  in 
Plato's  language  an  Idea  of  a  Divine  Mind,  an  individual  object  present 
to  its  pure  intuition,  the  most  perfect  of  every  kind  of  possible  beings,  and 
the  archetype  of  all  phenomenal  objects.  Without  soaring  so  high,  we 
have  to  admit  that  human  reason  contains  not  only  ideas,  but  ideals  also, 
which  though  they  have  not,  like  those  of  Plato,  creative,  yet  have 
certainly  practical  power  (as  regulative  principles)  and  form  the  basis  of 
the  possible  perfection  of  certain  acts."2  Kant  proceeds  in  endless 
repetition  to  show  the  futility  of  trying  to  construct  reality  from  pure 
concepts  in  the  old  rationalistic  way.  He  has  demonstrated  the 
weakness  of  the  ontological  argument,  the  physico-theological  argument, 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  642.  3  Ibid.,  p.  460. 

39 


40  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT  S   PHILOSOPHY 

and  of  all  theology  based  on  speculative  principles  of  reason.  Some  of 
these  expressions  are  pertinent  for  other  purposes,  but  just  here  their 
scientific  application  is  the  issue.  He  says:  "I  maintain,  accordingly, 
that  transcendental  ideas  ought  never  to  be  employed  as  constitutive. 
They  have,  however,  a  most  admirable  and  indispensably  necessary 
regulative  use,  in  directing  the  understanding  to  a  certain  aim."1  He 
practically  says  with  the  pragmatist  that  we  are  striving  constantly  for 
the  unification  of  our  knowledge  and  experience.  He  points  out  plainly 
the  instrumental  character  of  every  common  scientific  concept.  "We 
must  confess  that  pure  earth,  pure  water,  pure  air,  are  hardly  to  be  met 
with.  Nevertheless  we  require  the  concepts  of  these  in  order  to  be  able 
to  determine  properly  the  share  which  belongs  to  every  one  of  these 
natural  causes  in  phenomena."2  Natural  philosophers  thus  make  use 
of  concepts  from  reason  "to  explain  the  mutual  chemical  workings  of 
matter.  The  hypothetical  use  of  reason,  resting  on  ideas  as  prob- 
lematical concepts,  is  thus  at  work  constantly  in  science  to  introduce 
unity  into  the  particulars  of  knowledge."3  Unity,  that  is  practical 
workability,  is  the  very  touchstone  of  the  truth  of  these  rules.  Kant 
emphasizes  the  impossibility  of  changing  such  scientific  rules  into 
transcendental  principles  of  reason.  They  are  all  tentative,  subject  to 
revision.  He  warns  us  that  philosophers  have  unconsciously  forgotten 
to  keep  this  distinction  and  "the  transcendental  presupposition  is  con- 
cealed in  their  principles  in  the  cleverest  way."4  He  mentions  mani- 
foldness,  variety,  and  unity  as  mere  ideas  for  the  guidance  of  reason 
in  its  empirical  progress,  "heuristic  principles  in  the  elaboration  of 
experience."5  Once  more  these  dynamical  principles  (and  here  dynami- 
cal gets  its  true  significance  in  Kant's  thought)  are  falsely  contrasted 
with  constitutive,  mathematical  principles,  but  that  is  not  the  point. 
The  point  is  that  certain  concepts  or  principles  may  be  and  must  be  used 
as  scientific  maxims  in  our  progress  toward  systematical  unity.  It  should 
be  emphasized,  at  the  cost  of  whatever  repetition,  that  Kant  is  specific 
as  to  the  scientific,  purposive,  hypothetical  nature  of  these  ideas  of 
reason.  They  are  "heuristic  not  ostensive."  They  enable  us  to  make 
inquiries  of  nature  and  go  forward.  They  do  not  afford  an  answer  all 
ready  made.  The  latter,  says  Kant,  would  be  the  reverse  of  scientific 
method.  To  suppose  that  by  means  of  these  ideas  we  could  have 
knowledge  of  real  objects  in  the  way  of  definite  correspondence  would 
be  to  dispense  with  the  use  of  reason  or  to  turn  its  activity  in  a  wrong 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  518. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  519.  3  Ibid.,  p.  520.  «  Ibid.,  p.  524.  *  Ibid.,  p.  533. 


THE  IDEAL   OF   REASON  41 

direction.  The  dogmatist  who  assumes  by  pure  a  priori  speculations  to 
demonstrate  the  unity  a,nd  immateriality  of  the  soul,  or  the  origin  of  all 
things  in  God's  intelligence,  is  starting  at  the  wrong  end.  He  is  turning 
away  from  pure  empirical  investigation,  or  he  merely  twists  empirical 
facts  to  correspond  with  the  results  of  his  a  priori  reasoning.  He 
imposes  upon  nature  his  external  system  of  teleology  and  prevents 
himself  from  finding  out  the  real  nature  of  its  unity.  His  argument 
moves  in  a  circle,  assuming  the  very  thing  it  sets  out  to  prove. 

While  Kant  recognizes  the  need  of  certain  ideas  to  direct  and  sys- 
tematize experience,  he  breaks  again  with  the  pragmatist  in  regarding 
experience  itself  as  inadequate  for  their  realization  or  verification.  Yet 
he  practically  proceeds  to  verify  them  or  deduce  them  just  as  he  has 
deduced  his  more  certain  categories.  His  "deduction"  of  these  ideas 
illustrates  the  pragmatic  notion  of  truth.  Such  concepts,  ideas  of  the 
speculative  reason,  have  "a  schema  to  which  no  object,  not  even  a 
hypothetical  one,  corresponds  directly,  but  which  seems  only  to  represent 
to  ourselves  indirectly  other  objects  through  their  relation  to  those 
ideas,  and  according  to  their  systematic  unity."1  After  all  that  he  has 
said  in  criticism  of  the  three  transcendental  ideas — the  psychological, 
cosmological,  and  theological — his  real  deduction  of  them  consists  in 
showing  that  our  experience  is  better  arranged  and  improved  by  means 
of  them  than  without  them.  It  is  significant  here  that  he  reiterates  and 
illustrates  what  he  has  already  indicated  in  his  "Schematism  of  the 
Categories,"  namely,  that  such  concepts  as  substance,  reality,  and  even 
causation  "have  no  meaning,  unless  they  are  used  to  make  the  empirical 
knowledge  of  an  object  possible.  They  may  be  used  to  explain  the  pos- 
sibility of  things  in  the  world  of  sense,  but  not  to  explain  the  possibil- 
ity of  a  universe  itself,  because  such  an  hypothesis  is  outside  the  world 
and  could  never  be  an  object  of  possible  experience."2  Kant  is  merely 
extending  his  schematism  over  the  whole  field  of  ideas  and  practically 
vindicating  the  ideas  of  reason  on  the  same  level  with  his  necessary 
categories,  namely,  by  their  cogency  in  practical  working.  In  the 
words  of  DeLaguna: 

They  are  never  realized  in  any  experience;  that  is  to  say,  no  analysis  of  a 
given  experience  can  reveal  them  as  verified  in  it.  Yet  they  are  essential  to 
thought;  for  it  is  through  their  use  that  given  experience  becomes  organized 
into  the  larger  unity  of  experience  as  a  whole.  Their  kinship  with  pragmatic 
postulates  thus  appears  upon  their  face.  Kant  seems  to  say  of  them  what  the 

*  Ibid.,  p.  538. 
'  Ibid.,  p.  544. 


42  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN  KANT  S   PHILOSOPHY 

pragmatist  would  say  of  all  conceptions — that  while  they  are  never  completely 
satisfied  by  any  application  of  them,  yet  they  serve  to  bring  unity  to  our 
thought  and  in  this  service  if  in  no  other  find  their  sanction.1 

Thus  Kant  would  use  the  idea  of  the  soul  not  in  the  Cartesian  sense 
of  substance  (res}  but  merely  as  an  instrumental  hypothesis.  In  the 
Paralogisms  of  Pure  Reason  he  has  clearly  shown  that  it  is  by  confusion 
of  the  logical  subject  with  a  real  substrate  that  the  false  rationalistic 
demonstration  of  the  soul's  substantiality  proceeds.  The  idea  of  the 
soul  as  an  unconditioned  unity  is  not  a  matter  of  proof  or  disproof.  We 
can  no  more  infer  from  the  ego  of  which  we  are  conscious,  that  is  from 
our  one  and  identical  thought,  the  existence  of  the  soul  as  a  substance 
than  we  can  infer  a  soul  of  the  world  from  the  unity  of  the  universe.  Yet 
thought  does  appear  as  one  and  identical.  That  is  the  condition  of  its 
very  existence.  The  possibility  of  the  corporeal  world  presupposes 
the  thinking  ego,  the  transcendental  unity  of  apperception.  All  the 
categories,  all  the  forms  of  thought,  involve  this  as  their  first  condition. 
They  all  have  meaning  and  value  because  they  are  the  means  which 
produce  the  unity  of  consciousness. 

Kant  schematizes  the  soul,  as  it  were.  In  his  same  heavy  way  he 
says  it  is  "  the  concept  of  the  empirical  unity  of  all  thought.  Its  object  is 
merely  to  find  principles  of  systematic  unity  for  the  explanation  of  the 
phenomena  of  the  soul."2  He  is  explicit  in  stressing  the  psychological 
character  of  this  idea.  His  expressions  recall  the  statement  of  a  leading 
contemporary  psychologist  that,  in  this  connection,  the  soul  as  an  entity 
is  as  extinct  as  the  dodo.  Yet  even  in  legal  science  today  we  deal  with 
souls — with  individuals.  So  for  purposes  of  unity — Kant  would  seem 
to  say — all  the  grounds  of  explanation  must  be  traced  to  one  single 
principle.  As  if  to  guard  against  misconstruction  he  repeats:  "It  is 
quite  permissible  to  represent  to  ourselves  the  soul  as  simple,  in  order, 
according  to  this  idea,  to  use  the  complete  and  necessary  unity  of  all 
the  faculties  of  the  soul,  but  to  assume  the  soul  as  a  simple  substance 
(which  is  a  transcendent  concept)  would  be  a  proposition  not  only 
indemonstrable  but  purely  arbitrary  and  rash."3  As  Windelband  well 
expresses  it,  "It  is  an  heuristic  principle  for  investigating  the  inter- 
connections of  the  psychical  life."''  In  disclaiming  in  this  place  any 
consideration  of  its  spiritual  nature,  Kant  intimates  that  such  a  reference 
would  immediately,  by  contrast  with  the  corporeal,  lift  the  concept  out 
of  its  relations  of  experience  and  render  it  meaningless.  This  actualistic 

1  Op.  cit.,  p.  82.  a  Ibid.,  p.  618. 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  548.  4  History  of  Phil.,  p.  549. 


THE  IDEAL  OF  REASON  43 

theory  of  the  soul,  to  use  Paulsen's  term,  is  really  a  dynamic  element 
in  Kant's  treatment.  "The  soul  is  not  a  mere  dead  substrate,  not  an 
unchanging  substance  like  an  atom,  but  pure  energy,  spontaneous  energy 
of  knowing  and  willing."1  This  view  was  lost  or  obscured  for  a  long 
time  and  its  revival  in  the  pragmatic  movement  is  no  insignificant 
element  of  contact  between  Kant's  philosophy  and  the  latter  movement. 

The  second  regulative  idea  of  speculative  reason,  the  universe,  is  a 
functional  concept,  as  Kant  uses  it,  for  dealing  with  nature  in  general. 
We  must  have  a  rule  for  dealing  with  the  totality  of  the  series  of  phe- 
nomena. "The  absolute  totality  of  the  series  of  these  conditions 
determining  the  derivation  of  all  their  members,  is  an  idea  which, 
though  never  brought  to  perfection  in  the  empirical  use  of  reason,  may 
yet  become  a  rule,  telling  us  how  to  proceed  in  the  explanation  of  given 
phenomena."2  The  universe  as  such  an  idea  cannot  be  treated  as  an 
object  of  knowledge,  in  the  Kantian  sense.  He  has  already  shown  in  the 
antinomies  that  when  the  universe  is  treated  in  this  abstract  manner 
propositions  mutually  contradictory  can  be  affirmed  of  it.  It  is  evidently 
the  world  of  human  experience,  not  a  great  external  fabric  of  reality 
existing  in  its  own  independence,  that  Kant  has  here  in  mind. 

The  third  idea  of  reason — God — as  a  regulative  or  functional  idea, 
"can  always  benefit  reason  and  yet  never  injure  it."3  It  serves  "to 
connect  the  things  of  the  world  according  to  teleological  laws  and  thus 
to  arrive  at  their  greatest  systematical  unity."4  This  reminds  one  of 
expressions  of  James,  except  for  certain  anthropomorphic  characters  in 
the  latter's  view  of  God  which  Kant  could  not  accept.  Kant  says: 
"Reason  can  have  no  object  here  but  its  own  formal  rule  in  the  extension 
of  its  empirical  use,  but  can  never  aim  at  extension  beyond  all  limits  of 
its  empirical  application."5  The  idea  of  God,  in  other  words,  is  plainly 
a  scientific  hypothesis  for  empirical  satisfaction.  Kant  would  seem  to 
say  that  we  need  the  idea  of  God  as  the  chemist  needs  his  atom  or  the 
physicist  his  idea  of  force.  Atom,  force,  and  God  are  all  speculations, 
but  they  are  necessary.  Like  Joseph  Landor,  Kant  would  hold  that 
the  presumption  is  in  favor  of  the  simplest  hypothesis,  and  he  fails  to 
get  any  unity  in  his  cosmos  without  the  God  idea.  He  has  exposed  and 
explained  away  the  rationalistic  fallacy  of  the  ontological  proof  which 
would  establish  existence  from  mere  concepts,  of  the  physico-theological 
argument  which  results  in  a  mere  "Architect  of  the  World,"  and  of  the 

1  Immanuel  Kant,  p.  393. 

3  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  550. 

J  Ibid.,  p.  554.  <  Ibid.  s  Ibid. 


44  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

cosmological  proof  which  involves  a  petitio  principii,  seeking  the  "first 
cause"  of  all  that  is  contingent  in  an  "absolutely  necessary  existence"; 
but,  used  as  a  functional  idea  this  concept  affords  a  needed  motive  for 
scientific  investigation  of  groups  of  phenomena.  To  assume  God  as 
proven  in  the  old  sense  is  "to  imagine  the  efforts  of  our  reason  as  ended 
when  we  have  really  dispensed  with  its  employment."1  It  would  be 
just  the  reverse  of  true  scientific  method. 

If  I  begin  with  a  supreme  ordaining  Being,  as  the  ground  of  all  things,  the 
unity  of  nature  is  really  surrendered  as  being  quite  foreign  to  the  nature  of 
things,  purely  contingent,  and  not  to  be  known  from  its  own  general  laws. 
Thus  arises  a  vicious  circle  by  our  presupposing  what  in  reality  ought  to  have 
been  proved.  But  if  we  use  the  idea  as  a  regulative  principle  for  the  sys- 
tematical unity  in  a  teleological  connection  according  to  general  laws — the 
principle  can  enlarge  the  use  of  reason  with  reference  to  experience.3 
We  are  not  here  concerned  to  add  his  moral  proof  but  merely  to  see  his 
justification  of  this  idea  as  a  practical  postulate.  Not  only  is  he  prag- 
matic in  the  adoption  of  this  postulate  but  he  finds  it  verified  in  its 
efficient  working,  precisely  as  the  pragmatist  would  contend.  He  adds: 
"As  much  of  design,  therefore,  as  you  discover  in  the  world,  according 
to  that  principle,  so  much  of  confirmation  has  the  legitimacy  of  your 
idea  received."3  In  the  Canon  of  Pure  Reason  Kant  recurs  to  this  idea 
in  words  and  illustrations  most  significant  for  this  comparative  study. 
The  point  is  slightly  confused  by  the  contrast  of  practical  with  doctrinal 
belief,  both  of  which  would  fall  legitimately  under  the  pragmatic  con- 
ception of  practical.  The  existence  of  God  is  there  assigned  to  the 
category  of  the  doctrinal.  The  discussion,  however,  deserves,  from  the 
standpoint  of  this  study,  a  careful  analysis. 

Before  we  continue  the  consideration  of  this  particular  hypothesis,  two 
points  should  be  noted  in  Kant's  treatment  in  this  chapter — the  limita- 
tion of  the  notion  of  truth  to  single  judgments  and  his  stand  against  the 
conception  of  truth  as  a  mere  copying  relation.  In  both  of  these  his 
handling  of  the  matter  is  strikingly  similar  to  expressions  and  illustra- 
tions of  James.  Kant  had  spoken  in  the  preceding  chapter  of  the  possi- 
bility of  a  usable  idea  which  does  not,  in  the  ordinary  sense,  correspond 
to  an  object.  He  now  affords  a  better,  and  a  decidedly  pragmatic, 
conception  of  what  real  correspondence  with  an  object  must  be  to  make 
sense.  Kant  does  say,  to  be  sure,  that  "truth  depends  upon  agreement 
with  its  object,"4  but  by  clear  illustration  he  interprets  agreement  in  a 
sense  more  nearly  related  to  that  of  the  pragmatist  than  to  that  of  the 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  554. 

1  Ibid.,  p.  556.  » Ibid.,  p.  561.  <  Ibid.,  p.  658. 


THE   IDEAL  OF   REASON  45 

realist  or  the  idealist.  He  has  been  showing,  just  as  pragmatists  in 
answer  to  criticisms  have  shown,  the  absurdity  of  holding  a  thing  true 
because  it  satisfies  some  individual,  subjective  need  or  inclination. 
He  says: 

If  it  has  its  ground  in  the  peculiar  character  of  the  subject  only,  it  is  called 
persuasion.  If  the  judgment  is  valid  for  everybody,  then  the  ground  of  it  is 

objectively  sufficient  and  the  holding  of  it  true  is  called  conviction 

Truth  depends  on  agreement  with  the  object,  and  with  regard  to  it  the 

judgments  of  every  understanding  must  agree  with  each  other An 

external  criterion,  therefore,  as  to  whether  our  holding  a  thing  to  be  true  be 
conviction  or  only  persuasion  consists  in  the  possibility  of  communicating  it, 
and  finding  its  truth  to  be  valid  for  the  reason  of  every  man.1 

We  may  compare  this  with  Schiller,  "  To  be  really  certain,  a  truth  must 
show  more  than  an  individual  value.  It  must  acquire  social  recognition 
and  change  into  a  common  property."2 

The  character  of  the  agreement  Kant  has  in  mind  is  vitally  significant. 
It  is  difficult  in  this  whole  passage  to  read  into  his  meaning  the  ter- 
minology of  Hegel,  who  describes  the  idea  as  running  over  into  the  object, 
of  the  notion  as  finding  itself  again  in  objectivity,  and  of  an  eternal 
system  of  notions  built  up  as  absolute  truth.  Far  less  can  we  find  here 
the  meaning  of  the  out-and-out  realist.  But  let  us  first  take  James's 
illustration  of  the  agreement  of  ideas  with  their  objects: 

According  to  the  general  view  a  true  idea  must  copy  its  reality.  Like 
other  popular  views,  this  one  follows  the  analogy  of  the  usual  experience. 
Our  true  ideas  of  sensible  things  do  indeed  copy  them.  Shut  your  eyes  and 
think  of  yonder  clock  on  the  wall,  and  you  get  just  such  a  true  picture  or  copy 
of  its  dial.  But  your  idea  of  its  works  (unless  you  are  a  clock-maker)  is  much 
less  of  a  copy,  yet  it  passes  muster,  for  it  in  no  way  clashes  with  the  reality. 
Even  though  it  should  shrink  to  the  mere  word  works,  that  word  still  serves 
you  truly  and  when  you  speak  of  the  time-keeping  function  of  the  clock,  or  of 
the  spring's  elasticity,  it  is  hard  to  see  what  your  ideas  can  copy.  Wherein 
stands  the  truth  of  our  assertion  that  the  thing  there  on  the  wall  is  a  clock  ? 
We  use  it  as  a  clock,  regulating  the  length  of  our  lecture  by  it.  The  verification 
of  the  assumption  here  means  its  leading  to  no  frustration  or  contradiction. 
Verifiability  of  wheels  and  weights  and  pendulum  is  as  good  as  verification. 
For  one  truth  process  completed  there  are  a  million  in  our  lives  that  function 
in  this  state  of  nascency.  They  turn  us  toward  direct  verification;  lead  us 

into  the  surroundings  of  the  objects  they  envisage To  agree,  in  the 

widest  sense,  with  a  reality  can  only  mean  to  be  guided  either  straight  up  to 
it  or  into  its  surroundings,  or  to  be  put  into  such  working  touch  with  it  as  to 
handle  either  it  or  something  connected  with  it  better  than  if  we  disagreed 
with  it.3 

1  Ibid.,  p.  658.  *  Humanism,  p.  58.  }  Pragmatism,  p.  213. 


46  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

In  accordance  with  this  it  would  appear  that  there  are  only  single 
truths.  There  is  no  absolute  truth  written  with  bold  capital  letters. 
Now  Kant  declares:  "I  cannot  maintain  anything,  that  is,  affirm  it  as  a 
judgment,  necessarily  valid  for  everybody  except  it  work  conviction."1 
If  it  does  work  conviction  in  its  communication  and  be  seen  as  valid  for 
the  reason  of  every  man,  "  there  is  at  least  a  presumption  that  the  ground 
of  the  agreement  of  all  judgments  rests  upon  the  common  ground, 
namely,  on  the  object  with  which  they  all  agree,  and  thus  proves  the 
truth  of  the  judgment."2  In  the  pages  immediately  following  he  gives 
an  illuminating  illustration  of  this  kind  of  agreement  with  object. 
Trowing,  believing,  knowing  are  treated  as  degrees  in  the  process  of 
adopting  and  verifying  a  hypothesis.  Trowing  is  a  surmise  in  the  face 
of  a  problem.  "It  is  to  hold  true  with  the  consciousness  that  it  is 
insufficient  both  subjectively  and  objectively."3  Believing,  an  attitude 
to  which  we  are  driven  by  a  problem — driven  for  a  practical  solution  of 
some  kind — occurs  "if  the  holding  true  is  sufficient  subjectively,  but  is 

held  to  be  insufficient  objectively While,  if  it  is  sufficient  both 

subjectively  and  objectively,  it  is  called  knowing."4  Now  as  to  the  real 
nature  of  this  objective  sufficiency  follows  an  illustration  that  reads  like  a 
citation  from  one  of  the  pragmatists.  To  accomplish  ends  which  we  are 
obliged  to  propose  to  ourselves  "certain  conditions  are  hypothetically 
necessary,"  or,  as  we  should  say,  certain  hypotheses  are  needed.  The 
physician  called  suddenly  to  a  case  of  illness  must  do  something  for  the 
patient.  He  does  not  yet  know  the  sickness.  He  looks  at  the  symptoms 
and  judges,  because  he  knows  nothing  better,  that  it  looks  like  phthisis. 
"His  belief,  according  to  his  own  judgment,  is  contingent  only,  and  he 
knows  that  another  might  form  a  better  judgment.  It  is  this  kind  of 
contingent  belief  which,  nevertheless,  supplies  a  ground  for  the  actual 
employment  of  means  to  certain  actions,  which  I  call  pragmatic  belief."5 
Here  we  have  not  only  the  word  correctly  used  but  the  situation  just  as 
the  pragmatist  likes  to  sketch  it — a  problem  calling  for  activity,  necessi- 
tating a  hypothesis,  a  belief  growing  out  of  the  conditions  and  verifying 
itself — its  truth,  its  agreement  with  its  object — in  its  successful  grappling 
with  the  conditions  and  solving  the  problem.  Correspondence  with 
object  has,  then,  for  Kant,  by  plain  implication  at  least,  the  pragmatic 
significance  of  response  to  human  needs,  the  keeping-step  with  our 
advance  in  knowledge  and  experience. 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  659. 

3  Ibid.,  p.  658.  «  Ibid. 

s  Ibid.,  p.  659.  « Ibid.,  p.  661. 


THE  IDEAL  OF   REASON  47 

And  now,  returning  to  our  direct  application,  it  is  precisely  thus  that 
Kant  proceeds  to  verify  the  idea  of  God  as  a  scientific  postulate.  It  is 
the  usefulness  of  this  idea  as  a  working  hypothesis  for  the  investigation 
of  nature  that  furnishes  its  vindication. 

The  unity  of  design  is  so  important  a  condition  of  the  application  of  reason 
to  nature  that  I  cannot  ignore  it,  especially  as  experience  supplies  so  many 
examples  of  it.  Of  that  unity  of  design,  however,  I  know  no  other  condition 
which  would  make  it  a  guidance  in  my  study  of  nature,  but  the  supposition 
that  a  supreme  intelligence  has  ordered  all  things  according  to  the  wisest  ends. 
As  a  condition,  therefore,  of,  it  may  be  a  contingent  but  not  unimportant  end, 
namely,  in  order  to  have  a  guidance  in  the  investigation  of  nature,  it  is  necessary 
to  admit  a  wise  author  of  the  world.  The  result  of  my  experience  confirms  the 
usefulness  of  this  supposition  so  many  times,  while  nothing  decisive  can  be 
adduced  against  it,  that  I  am  really  saying  far  too  little  if  I  call  my  acceptance 
of  it  a  mere  opinion,  and  it  may  be  said,  even  with  regard  to  these  theoretical 
matters,  that  I  firmly  believe  in  God.1 

Even  here,  however,  in  the  most  obviously  pragmatic  portion  of  the 
Critique  of  Pure  Reason,  there  is  a  difference  between  Kant  and  the 
pragmatist  that  will  not  down.  The  very  contrast  throughout  this 
section  of  constitutive  and  regulative  principles  involves  a  tacit  reference 
on  one  side  to  a  region  of  reality  that  has  no  abiding-place  in  true  func- 
tional thinking.  Kant  wearies  the  reader  with  the  affirmation  and  the 
proof  that  this  ultimate  region  is  not  for  us  in  our  knowledge  and  makes 
contradiction  and  confusion  in  our  philosophy.  And  that  fact  should 
have  expelled  it  at  once.  But  it  is  evident  that,  in  Kant's  thought,  for 
some  intelligible  character  or  reality  there  may  be  constitutive  thought 
not  vouchsafed  to  phenomenal  beings. 

The  transcendental  ideas  have  no  constitutive,  but  only  a  regulative  use; 
in  other  words  their  use  is  to  direct  all  the  operations  of  the  understanding 
to  one  end  or  point  of  union.  This  point  is  indeed  a  mere  idea  or  focus 
imaginarius,  since  it  lies  beyond  the  sphere  of  experience,  and  the  conceptions 
of  the  understanding  do  not  find  their  source  in  it;  yet  it  serves  to  give  to 
these  conceptions  the  greatest  possible  unity  combined  with  the  most  extended 
application.2 

Now  pragmatism  must,  to  be  consistent,  insist  that  conceptual 
thought  itself  is  directly  related  to  science  and  human  conduct.  It 
comes  to  the  same  thing  for  knowledge,  as  Kant  is  concerned  in  his  whole 
system  to  show,  but  pragmatism  leaves  no  conceptual  thought  as  it 
leaves  no  noumenal  characters  standing  off  in  a  separate  region.  More- 
over, as  DeLaguna  has  pointed  out,  there  is  too  much  absolutism,  after 

1  Ibid.,  p.  663.  3  Meiklejohn's  trans.,  p.  395. 


48  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

all,  involved  in  these  regulative  ideas  of  reason  to  satisfy  the  prag- 
matist.  They  seem  for  the  most  part  to  be  as  fixed,  in  Kant's  con- 
ception, as  the  categories  themselves.  There  is  the  same  lack  of  evolu- 
tion, of  change  to  meet  changing  requirements,  in  them  as  in  the  table 
of  categories.  Kant  expresses  with  no  uncertain  sound  this  lack  of 
evolution  in  even  his  most  scientific  moods:  "The  greatest  and  perhaps 
the  only  advantage  of  all  philosophy  of  pure  reason  seems  therefore  to 
be  negative  only;  because  it  serves,  not  as  an  organon  for  the  extension, 
but  as  a  discipline  for  the  limitation  of  its  domain,  and  instead  of  dis- 
covering truth,  it  only  claims  the  modest  merit  of  preventing  error."1 
Elsewhere,  of  course,  he  intimates  that  his  purpose  in  "limiting  the 
domain  "  of  pretentious  knowledge  is  precisely  to  make  it  a  positive  factor 
for  future  scientific  progress — a  factor  that  may  be  used  with  certain 
confidence  just  because  of  its  restriction  within  limits.  He  goes  a  long 
way  back  to  get  a  running  start  for  a  good  jump.  His  purpose  is  pro- 
gressive, scientific.  But  it  remains  true  that  throughout  his  tedious 
investigation  of  knowledge  and  in  the  influence  which  he  directly  trans- 
mitted to  his  disciples  this  negative  character  of  philosophy  was  para- 
mount. In  this  connection  James  is  correct  in  holding  that  since 
Kant's  time  the  word  "philosophy"  has  come  to  stand  for  mental  and 
moral  speculation  far  more  than  for  physical  theories. 

To  know  the  actual  peculiarities  of  the  world  we  are  born  into  is  surely  as 
important  as  to  know  what  makes  worlds  anyhow  abstractly  possible.  Yet 
this  latter  knowledge  has  been  treated  by  many  since  Kant's  time  as  the  only 
knowledge  worthy  of  being  called  philosophical.  Common  men  feel  the 
question,  "What  is  nature  like  ?"  to  be  as  meritorious  as  the  Kantian  question, 
"How  is  nature  possible  ?"2 

It  is  the  extension  of  knowledge  that  is  of  vital  concern  to  the 
pragmatist.  While  this  charge  of  James  must  be  conceded  against 
Kantianism  historically — as  a  methodological  influence — we  must 
reiterate  that  it  was  precisely  the  desire  to  forward  sure  and  certain 
knowledge  that  led  Kant  forth  at  all  on  his  memorable  intellectual 
excursion.  He  was  wrong  only  as  to  the  method  of  securing  certain 
knowledge  and  as  to  the  real  scope  of  that  knowledge. 

Kant  seems  to  be  fully  aware  of  this  serious  limitation  to  his  system  - 
when  he  turns  toward  the  practical  use  of  pure  reason.     Particularly 
when  he  faces  the  problems  of  the  moral  life  does  he  realize  the  need  of 
something  more  dynamic.    There  are,  as  Royce  has  said,  many  devious 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  638. 

*  Some  Problems  of  Philosophy,  pp.  14,  15. 


THE  IDEAL  OF  REASON  49 

paths  in  Kant.  He  is  not  always  consistent.  Ward's  saying  that  the 
three  Critiques  must  be  united  into  one  is  pertinent  here.  Dewey  has, 
a  propos  of  this  thought,  reminded  us  that  to  give  Kant's  elements  of 
thought  any  such  worth  as  he  himself  wished  to  attach  to  them  we 
must  take  them  in  only  one  of  the  two  senses  in  which  he  uses  them. 
They  must  be  understood  as  "regulating,  making  experience  different 
in  a  determinative  sense  and  manner.  Taken  in  the  sense  of  a  static, 
immanent,  fixed  endowment,  and  therefore  making  no  determinate 
difference  to  any  one  experience  as  compared  with  another  they  are 
confusing  and  have  led  to  serious  misconceptions  in  later  philosophy."1 
In  getting  too  much  necessity  and  universality  "we  mythologize  reality 
and  deprive  the  life  of  thoughtful  endeavor  of  its  ground  for  being."2 
To  summarize  Kant's  treatment  of  the  regulative  ideas  of  reason, 
and  particularly  his  section  on  the  "Ideal  of  Reason,"  we  find  that  he 
adumbrates,  if  he  does  not  definitely  formulate,  the  current  pragmatic 
conception  of  mental  growth,  of  all  human  progress,  by  postulating. 
He  is  less  hampered  here  than  elsewhere  by  the  dogmatic  heritage  of 
things-in-themselves.  Before  approaching  specifically  the  significance 
and  proof  of  his  postulates  for  the  moral  life,  even  in  this  first  Critique, 
he  shows  that  for  the  theoretical  reason  itself,  for  the  demands  of  our 
common  life,  for  the  interests  of  straightforward  scientific  progress,  we 
must  adopt  hypotheses,  and  that  these  find  their  justification  and  validity 
in  their  actual  power  of  introducing  simplicity,  harmony,  continuity. 
This  is  true  of  the  actual  world  in  which  we  labor.  It  is  true  of  the  man 
in  the  streets,  the  man  at  his  daily  tasks.  The  soul  or  ego,  the  world  and 
God  are  instrumental  ideas,  having  their  significance,  and  the  only  proof 
of  which  they  are  capable,  in  their  usefulness,  in  their  indispensable 
character  for  the  unification  of  thought  and  life.  They  fall  short  of 
pragmatic  postulates  only  in  the  fact  that  they  seem,  like  all  of  Kant's 
concepts  and  postulates,  to  be  fixed  and  final  for  all  time  and  all 
conditions. 

1  Influence  of  Darwin  on  Phil.,  p.  207. 
«  Ibid. 


KANT'S    TELEOLOGY    VERSUS    MECHANICAL    CAUSALITY 

One  phase  of  Kant's  formulation  of  the  antinomies  that  affords 
significant  comparisons  with  pragmatic  attitudes  is  his  statement  of  the 
problem  of  mechanism  and  teleology.  He  touches  it  rather  lightly  in 
the  first  Critique  and  resumes  the  discussion  in  the  Critique  of  Judgment. 
In  both  cases  he  hints  at  its  proper  solution  by  the  substitution  of  a  both 
and  consideration  for  an  either  or.  He  comes  upon  the  problem  in  his 
transition  from  the  transcendental  mathematical  ideas  to  the  transcen- 
dental dynamical.  His  both  and  assumes  the  very  burdens  which  the 
pragmatist  would  wish  to  avoid,  but  its  significance  is  in  indicating  Kant's 
dissatisfaction  with  a  closed  system  that  leaves  little  or  nothing  to 
purposive  human  activity.  Moreover  it  bears  superficial  resemblances 
to  similar  discussions  in  pragmatic  literature.  Kant  seeks  refuge  in  the 
admission  of  an  intelligible  cause  as  well  as  a  phenomenal,  in  intellectual 
perception  as  well  as  sensuous.  Logically  carried  out,  this  would 
involve  all  the  old  dualism  and  has  no  proper  place  in  pragmatic  thinking. 
Kant  really  has  two  worlds,  while  pragmatism  would  limit  the  solution 
of  this  and  of  all  problems  to  one  and  the  same  order.  Shall  all  nature 
phenomena  be  mechanically  explained  or  do  certain  products  require  a 
teleological  explanation  ?  Kant  says  there  would  be  a  contradiction  if 
we  should  use  both  maxims  as  constitutive  principles,  that  is,  if  we  should 
hold  that  the  production  of  material  things  is  possible  only  on  the  laws 
of  mechanical  necessity,  yet  at  the  same  time  that  some  material  things 
can  be  produced  only  on  the  causal  law  of  ultimate  objects.  But,  he 
thinks,  there  is  no  contradiction  if  we  agree  to  regard  all  phenomena  as 
coming  under  the  principle  of  mechanism  assumed  as  the  basis  of  scientific 
investigation,  yet  still  retain  the  principle  of  ultimate  objects  as  a  guide 
to  reflection,  because  the  organism  of  the  part  can  be  explained  only  by 
a  consideration  of  the  aim  of  the  whole. 

This  might  seem  to  be  in  harmony  with  pragmatic  teaching  regarding 
the  conflict  of  postulates.  Pragmatism  holds  that  postulates  are  just 
methodological  maxims  of  our  Welt-Betrachtung.  Natural  science  for 
its  purposes  demands  that  mechanical  causality  be  carried  out  purely. 
So  Kant  says:  "The  intelligible  has  been  shown  to  be  useless  for  the 
explanation  of  phenomena."1  Schiller  admits  a  conflict  here  and  fails 
to  solve  it  further  than  to  suggest,  almost  in  Kant's  own  language,  that 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  454. 

So 


KANT'S  TELEOLOGY  VERSUS  MECHANICAL  CAUSALITY  51 

we  may  assume  the  teleological  treatment  for  a  general  principle  of  re- 
flection upon  the  whole  of  nature  and  subsume  mechanism  as  a  scientific 
method  under  it.  After  showing  that  teleology  is  an  indispensable 
postulate  in  human  thinking  because  the  conformity  between  nature  and 
human  nature  is  the  only  key  to  the  arcana  of  life  which  we  possess, 
Schiller  adds: 

The  ideal  of  scientific  explanation  is  mechanical,  and  this  is  taken  to  be 
anti-teleological.  So  far,  therefore,  teleology  remains  a  postulate  which  it  is 
not  possible  to  carry  through  and  to  render  an  axiom  of  biological  or  physical 
research.  For  in  the  first  place  the  anti-teleological  bias  of  natural  science  is 
largely  due  to  the  perverse  use  professing  teleologists  have  made  of  their  postu- 
late. Instead  of  treating  it  as  a  method  whereby  to  understand  the  complex 
relations  of  reality,  they  have  made  it  into  an  argos  logos  which  shut  off  all 
further  possibilities  of  investigation,  by  ascribing  everything  to  a  "divine  pur- 
pose" and  then  in  order  to  shirk  the  laborious  task  of  tracing  the  divine 
intelligence  in  the  world,  adding  the  suicidal  "rider"  that  the  divine  purpose 
was  inscrutable.1 

James  holds  that  teleology  and  mechanism  do  not  necessarily 
contradict  each  other.  To  say  that  they  do  would  be  equivalent  to 
saying,  "My  shoes  are  evidently  designed  to  fit  my  feet,  hence  it  is 
impossible  that  they  should  have  been  produced  by  machinery."  Now 
Kant  is  entirely  in  accord  with  these  thinkers  as  to  the  non-interference 
of  the  teleological  with  the  course  of  scientific  investigation,  with  such 
uniformities  and  regularities  as  it  is  possible  for  us  to  discover.  He  says : 

This  regulative  principle,  however,  does  not  exclude  the  admission  of  an 
intelligible  cause  not  comprehended  in  the  series,  when  we  come  to  the  pure 
use  of  reason  (with  reference  to  ends  or  aims).  For  in  this  case,  an  intelligible 
cause  only  means  the  transcendental  and,  to  us,  unknown  ground  of  the 
possibility  of  the  sensuous  series  in  general,  and  the  existence  of  this,  inde- 
pendent of  all  conditions  of  the  sensuous  series,  and  in  reference  to  it  uncondi- 
tionally necessary,  is  by  no  means  opposed  to  the  unlimited  contingency  of  the 
former,  nor  to  the  never-ending  regressus  in  the  series  of  empirical  conditions.3 
Evidently  Kant  would  not  impede  the  course  of  scientific  progress  with 
an  argos  logos. 

If  Kant  and  the  pragmatist,  then,  both  hold  to  the  teleological  as  a 
general  principle  of  reflection  upon  the  course  of  nature,  without  inter- 
fering with  mechanical  necessity  in  the  domain  of  scientific  research, 
what  is  the  difference  between  them?  Just  the  difference  between 
the  static  and  the  dynamic,  so  the  pragmatist  would  answer.  For  the 

1  Personal  Idealism,  "Axioms  as  Postulates,"  p.  119. 
3  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  456. 


52  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

latter  mechanical  causalty  itself,  with  all  other  categories,  has  its  genesis 
in  the  purposive  and  teleological  activity  of  human  thinking.  It  is 
penetrated  through  and  through  with  end-striving.  There  is  therefore 
no  sharp  difference  between  the  two  maxims  or  postulates.  Nature,  so 
far  as  we  have  proved  it,  is  sufficiently  adapted  to  our  thoughts  and 
wishes  and  sufficiently  anthropomorphic  to  be  mechanized.  Because  it 
is  mechanical  it  "works  into  our  hands."  But  Kant  holds  that  there  is 
only  an  accidental  fitness  of  relation  between  our  categories  and  experi- 
ence from  external  sources.  For  a  Godlike  intellect,  an  intuitive  under- 
standing, to  whom  form  and  content  alike  were  properly  a  priori,  this 
conformity  would  be  not  accidental  but  necessary. 

That  intelligible  cause,  therefore,  with  its  causality,  is  outside  the  series, 
though  its  effects  are  to  be  found  in  the  series  of  empirical  conditions.  In  its 
intelligible  character,  however,  the  same  subject  would  have  to  be  considered 
free  from  all  influence  of  sensibility,  and  from  all  determination  through 
phenomena;  and  as  in  it,  so  far  as  it  is  a  noumenon,  nothing  happens,  and  no 
change  which  requires  dynamical  determination  of  time,  and  therefore  no 
connection  with  phenomena  as  causes,  can  exist,  that  active  being  would  so 
far  be  quite  independent  and  free  in  its  acts  from  all  natural  necessity  which 
can  exist  in  the  world  of  sense  only.1 

The  mundus  intelligibilis  makes  a  gap  once  more  between  him  and 
the  functional  attitude.  In  order  to  have  design  in  his  otherwise 
necessitated  world  he  must  have  practically  another  set  of  categories 
than  those  which  suffice  for  the  mechanical  order.  But  this  would  put 
all  the  design  over  into  the  intelligible  world,  and  Kant  fails  to  realize 
that  there  would  be  no  room  left  for  teleology  in  the  order  in  which  we 
have  our  human  thinking  and  work  to  do.  As  Bergson  puts  it,  "there 
would  be  nothing  unforeseen,  no  invention  or  creation  in  the  universe."2 
We  should  be  merely  working  out  a  program  already  prepared  and 
completed.  Indeed,  logically  and  consistently  carried  out,  this  would 
seem  to  commit  even  the  intelligible  order  or  God  himself  to  a  plan  long 
since  completed  and  closed.  The  noumenal  order  itself  would  be  "the 
same  yesterday,  today,  and  forever."  The  more  serious  consequences, 
however,  would  seem  to  fall  to  us  in  the  limitations  placed  upon  our 
order,  in  the  consequent  loss  of  our  social  responsibility — the  highest 
dignity  and  inspiration  that  pertain  to  human  beings.  This  is  a  cardinal 
error  of  all  absolutism  and  comes  to  much  more  than  the  pragmatic 
conflict  of  postulates. 

1  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  438. 
1  Creative  Evolution,  p.  37. 


KANT'S  TELEOLOGY  VERSUS  MECHANICAL  CAUSALITY  53 

The  problem  carried  over  into  the  field  of  ethics  as  that  of  determin- 
ism and  indetermimsm  offers  the  same  comparisons  and  the  same  crux 
of  difference.  Kant  again  formulates  the  question  in  the  manner  of 
antinomies.  Pragmatism  also  treats  the  matter  as  a  conflict  of  postu- 
lates. In  both  cases  a  both  and  is  substituted  for  an  either  or 
consideration.  Kant  seeks  a  solution  in  adding  to  the  causal  necessity 
of  the  phenomenal  world  the  freedom  of  intelligible  characters.  Prag- 
matism seeks  the  solution  in  one  world  or  one  order  and  finds  it  by  giving 
to  our  thought  and  life  wider  scope.  Kant  may  be  called  pragmatic  in 
his  recognition  of  the  dilemma  in  which  his  closed  system  leaves  him  and 
in  artificially  blazing  a  path  out  at  all  costs.  His  necessity  must  be 
harmonized  with  freedom  if  morality  is  to  be  saved.  He  parts  from  the 
pragmatist  in  having  resort  to  his  assumed  noumenal  order: 

Our  problem  was  whether  freedom  is  contradictory  to  natural  causality  in 
one  and  the  same  action;  this  we  have  sufficiently  answered  by  showing  that 
freedom  may  have  relation  to  a  very  different  kind  of  conditions  from  those  of 
nature,  so  that  the  law  of  the  latter  does  not  affect  the  former,  and  both  may 
exist  independent  of,  and  undisturbed  by,  each  other.1 

Schiller  thinks  the  problem  is  not  insoluble  if  we  avoid  "  carrying  the 
assumption  out  of  the  realm  of  methodology  into  that  of  metaphysics." 
But  this  helps  us  very  little,  for  to  leave  a  gap  yawning  between  meta- 
physics and  other  fields  of  mental  activity  is  precisely  what  pragmatism 
protests  against  and  is  inconsistent  with  its  whole  theory  of  reality. 
James  thinks  the  whole  bogey  can  be  downed  if  we  rid  ourselves  of  the 
absolutist  conception  of  a  "  block-  universe "  and  our  antipathy  to  the 
idea  of  chance.  In  his  notable  illustration  of  alternative  paths  leading 
from  the  university  to  his  home  he  declares:  "What  a  hollow  outcry  is 
this  against  a  chance  which,  if  it  were  present  to  us,  we  could  by  no 
character  whatever  distinguish  from  a  rational  necessity."2  There  is  no 
such  thing  as 

absolute  accident,  something  irrelevant  to  the  rest  of  the  world.  What  divides 
us  into  possibility  men  and  anti-possibility  men  is  different  faiths  or  postulates 
of  rationality.  To  this  man  the  world  seems  more  rational  with  possibilities 
excluded,  and  talk  as  we  will  about  having  to  yield  to  evidence,  what  makes  us 
monists  or  pluralists,  determinists  or  indeterminists,  is  at  bottom  always  some 
sentiment  like  this.3 

James  concedes  too  much,  however,  in  resting  the  matter  wholly  on 
sentiment.  We  do  not  minimize  sentiment  but  just  here  we  are  asking 

1  Ibid.,  p.  451. 

3  Will-to-Believe,  p.  157.  3  Ibid.,  p.  153. 


54  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

what  attitude  toward  reality  will  keep  sentiment  within  the  bounds  of 
rationality.  Pragmatists  prefer  a  world  that  affords  possibilities, 
purposes,  decisions  which  help  to  make  changes,  to  alter  reality  in  the 
direction  in  which  we  want  to  go,  because  no  other  kind  of  world  gives 
moral  tone  and  dignity.  The  conception  of  a  "block-universe"  is 
intolerable  because  it  seems  unreasonable.  Temporal  being  is  not 
merely  the  appearance  of  an  Eternal  Reality  immutable  and  timeless. 
Being,  change,  activity  are  realities  in  the  fullest  sense.  Bergson  has 
suggested  that  any  sort  of  finalism  which  assumes  that  all  is  given 
becomes  after  all  only  an  inverted  mechanism.  Time  and  its  changes 
lose  their  worth  and  disappear  before  a  "mind  seated  at  the  center  of 
things."1  Hermann  gives  voice  to  the  same  thought:  "In  the  last 
resort  the  freedom  of  the  human  agent  under  such  an  eternally  con- 
ceived omnipotent  governor  of  the  universe  is  just  as  illusory  as  under  a 
frankly  naturalistic  scheme  of  physical  law."2  For  the  pragmatist  we 
as  agents  have  something  to  do  with  changing,  unifying,  and  ameliorating 
our  world.  This  is  what  is  involved  in  a  pluralistic  universe,  although 
the  pragmatist  would  concede  that  the  world  and  our  knowledge  of  it 
move  constantly  toward  an  ever-greater  unity.  We  are  not  now  con- 
cerned with  the  religious  aspects  of  the  problem,  but  evidently  pragma- 
tism has  room  for  religious  hypotheses  similar  to  Kant's  postulates  of 
the  practical  reason.  The  difference  again  roots  back  in  Kant's  rational- 
istic background.  The  God  of  James,  for  instance,  would  seem  to  be  a 
guiding  and  sympathizing  personality  working  for  good  and  not  respon- 
sible for  the  evil  in  the  world,  certainly  not  indifferent  to  it.  He  is  a 
kind  of  First  among  Peers,  as  indeterminate  as  we  are.  Kant's  Godly 
Urwesen  inhabits  realms  unknown  to  us  in  its  being.  When  we  seek  to 
approach  him  in  teleological  ways  we  think  merely  of  his  relations  to  our 
world,  not  of  his  own  spiritual  characteristics.  We  can  approach  the 
latter  only  by  analogy.  God's  understanding  is  intuitive  while  ours  is 
discursive.  "His  knowledge  must  be  perception,  not  thought,  for 
thought  always  involves  limitations."3  Kant  fails  to  escape  from  the 
problem  of  the  two  worlds.  The  placing  of  all  real  determination  of 
values  in  this  noumenal  world  involved  consequences  which  he  failed  to 
realize.  In  conceding  to  the  mechanical  order  all  human  action  which 
we  can  know,  in  making  our  phenomenal  experience  as  utterly  subject  to 
the  laws  of  matter  and  motion  as  is  the  path  of  a  billiard  ball,  he  virtually 

1  Op.  cit.,  p.  40. 

*  Eucken  and  Bergson,  p.  143. 

1  Watson,  Selections,  p.  37. 


3 


KANT'S  TELEOLOGY  VERSUS  MECHANICAL  CAUSALITY  55 

surrendered  to  the  "lower  categories  philosophy"  which  he  wanted  to 
refute.  His  forced  resort  to  a  noumenal  order  to  save  freedom  either 
from  mechanical  causality  on  one  side,  or  from  pleasure-pain  motives  on 
the  moral  side,  was  a  capitulation  of  all  realized  or  realizable  values  from 
which  further  thinking  should  have  saved  him.  He  does  preserve  these 
supreme  values  by  proceeding  to  think  and  act  as  if  the  two  worlds  were 
one,  as  if  we  were  not  necessitated  in  our  own  world.  Deeper  reflection 
should  have  revealed  to  him  that  the  obligation  so  to  think  and  act 
exposes  the  merely  tentative,  human,  experimental  nature  of  "  the  lower 
categories"  falsely  proven  to  be  fixed  and  changeless,  and  consequently 
leaves  no  insuperable  barrier  between  the  methods  of  our  workaday, 
scientific  lives  and  our  higher  interests. 

It  is  one  of  the  fruits  of  pragmatism  or  of  the  dynamic  conception  of 
reality  to  show  the  futility  of  endeavoring  to  prescribe  to  life  ends 
completely  formulated  and  understood  in  the  human  sense  of  the  word. 
In  Bergson's  incisive  words: 

To  speak  of  an  end  is  to  think  of  a  pre-existing  model  which  has  only  to  be 
realized.  It  is  to  suppose  that  all  is  given,  and  that  the  future  can  be  read  in 
the  present.  It  is  to  believe  that  life,  in  its  movement  and  in  its  entirety,  goes 
to  work  like  our  intellect,  which  is  only  a  motionless  and  fragmentary  view  of 
life,  and  which  naturally  takes  its  stand  outside  of  time.  Life,  on  the  contrary, 
progresses  and  endures  in  time.  Of  course,  when  once  the  road  has  been 
traveled,  we  can  glance  over  it,  mark  its  direction,  note  this  in  psychological 
terms,  and  speak  as  if  there  had  been  pursuit  of  an  end.  But,  of  the  road 
which  was  going  to  be  traveled,  the  human  mind  could  have  nothing  to  say, 
for  the  road  has  been  created  pari  passu  with  the  act  of  traveling  over  it,  being 
nothing  but  the  direction  of  this  act  itself.  At  every  instant,  then,  evolution 
must  admit  of  a  psychological  interpretation  which  is,  from  our  point  of  view, 
the  best  interpretation;  but  this  explanation  has  neither  value  nor  even 
significance  except  retrospectively.1 

In  ethical  theory  much  energy  has  been  expended  in  discussing 
whether  the  end  of  life  or  conduct  be  pleasure,  happiness,  or  perfection, 
instead  of  having  been  given  to  the  direct  amelioration  of  life  toward 
such  standards  as  the  actual  conditions  made  imperative.  The  evolu- 
tionary hypothesis  has  made  evident  the  fact  that  the  moral  life  is  not  a 
set  of  conditions  fixed  for  all  time,  but  that  it  is  constantly  being  deter- 
mined anew  by  fresh  conditions  and  combinations  which  themselves  help 
to  determine  the  ends.  We  do  not  arbitrarily  construct  ideals.  They 
are  made  by  elements  at  work  in  experience.  This  is  the  effectual 
answer  to  Locke's  query  as  to  a  mathematical  formulation  of  morals 

1  Op.  cit.t  p.  51. 


56  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT*S  PHILOSOPHY 

What  could  Locke  in  his  day  know  of  social  justice  as  it  presses  upon 
the  English  or  American  conscience  today?  Just  so  with  our  wider 
problem  of  mechanism  and  teleology.  If  reality  is  a  changing  order,  no 
theory  of  final  causes  can  be  accepted  that  mortgages  the  future.  The 
needs  and  conditions  of  the  growing  order  itself  must  help  reconstruct  the 
end  so  far  as  that  is  capable  of  statement  in  intellectual  terms.  It  is  our 
same  problem  ever  repeated  of  not  abstracting  the  intellect  as  a  self- 
inclosed  function  but  of  recognizing  its  role  as  one  of  the  factors  in  the 
more  comprehensive  reality. 


POSTULATES   OF   PRACTICAL   REASON   FOR   THE   MORAL 
AND  RELIGIOUS  LIFE 

In  his  consideration  of  the  summum  bonum  as  determining  the 
ultimate  aim  of  pure  reason  and  in  his  postulates  of  the  practical  reason, 
Kant  seems  to  realize  the  uselessnessof  the  fixed  system  he  has  elaborated, 
of  the  conception  of  experience  "to  which  the  speculative  ideas  have 
returned  us,"  and  turns  to  the  practical  use  of  reason  to  regain  some 
of  our  lost  ground  and  make  progress  in  the  direction  of  our  real 
interests.  Here,  in  reply  to  James,  it  appears  that  his  deeper  purpose 
from  the  beginning  was  intensely  practical,  whatever  may  have  been  the 
outcome  in  the  first  Critique.  His  desire  evidently  was,  in  explaining 
the  nature  of  knowledge  and  trying  to  reconcile  the  two  opposed  schools 
of  his  day,  to  limit  the  pretenses  of  philosophy  and  thus  clear  the  path 
for  the  practical  postulates  of  conduct  and  religion. 

In  the  approach  to  this  division  of  the  subject  several  points  and 
comparisons  should  be  clarified,  if  possible.  We  have  noted  the  frequent 
and  common  comparison  of  certain  positions  in  James's  Will-to-Believe 
and  Other  Essays  with  Kant's  postulates  of  the  practical  reason  as  having 
the  closest  relationships.  Yet  it  is  just  this  aspect  of  pragmatism  itself, 
as  treated  by  James,  that  has  received  the  most  merciless  criticism  and 
that  has  been  repudiated  by  some  pragmatists  themselves.  Dewey 
has  seemed  to  criticize  the  rather  loose  treatment  by  James  of  the 
satisfactions  of  the  practical  reason  on  the  ground  that  they  are  confused 
or  easily  capable  of  confusion  with  the  strictly  scientific  satisfactions  to 
which  ideas  must  be  restricted  if  they  are  to  stand  the  pragmatic  test  of 
truth  as  synonymous  with  workability.  James  is  believed  to  have  dealt 
too  generously  with  the  whole  matter  of  verification  and  verifiability  in 
regions  not  open  to  the  application  of  scientific  tests  and  standards. 
There  are,  of  course,  various  types  of  pragmatism,  and  one  is  by  no 
means  committed  to  the  proposition  that  all  of  James's  positions  and 
metaphorical  illustrations  are  sound,  in  the  effort  to  point  out  the 
functional  elements  concealed  in  Kant's  system.  But  the  criticism,  for 
our  essential  purposes,  deserves  examination  as  an  introduction  to 
this  chapter. 

The  criticism  offered  may  possibly  be  illustrated  as  follows:  Truth, 
it  is  said,  does  not  consist  in  a  copying  relation  but  in  the  workability  of 
a  concept  or  an  idea  for  the  satisfaction  of  needs  or  the  attainment  of 

57 


58  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

ends.  But  needs  and  ends  are  slippery  terms  and  the  satisfaction 
intended  must  be  scientifically  and  accurately  defined.  To  take  a 
homely  illustration,  I  may  have  an  idea  that  a  certain  book  much 
needed  by  me  at  the  time  of  writing  this  paper  is  in  an  adjoining  room. 
My  belief  that  this  particular  book  is  there  on  the  shelf  is  related  to  a 
definite  problem,  an  intellectual  need.  The  idea  or  belief  is  useless 
apart  from  the  determinate  experience  which  it  indicates.  The  idea's 
verification  will  consist  in  my  finding  the  book,  turning  to  the  accurate 
passage  desired,  and  using  it  for  the  confirmation  of  my  thought.  This 
would  be  a  case  of  "internal  accord  "  and  of  strictly  scientific  verification. 
The  idea  that  vaccination  is  the  preventive  of  smallpox  is  true  if  it  is 
verified  in  saving  hundreds  of  people  from  the  ravages  of  that  disease, 
as  attested  by  facts,  statistics.  Taking  a  historical  illustration,  Joan  of 
Arc  and  others  believed  that  she  had  seen  white  horses  ridden  by  celestial 
warriors  down  through  the  ethereal  spaces.  The  loose  criterion  of 
satisfaction  as  used  by  James  might  be  thought  to  warrant  the  position 
that  this  belief  was  true,  was  verified  in  its  consequences,  in  the 
satisfactory  adjustments  it  helped  to  create  in  Joan  of  Arc's  successful 
campaign  for  France.  But,  the  criticism  would  run,  a  scientific  test  of 
the  belief  would  necessitate  an  examination  of  the  ground  on  which  the 
horses  were  alleged  to  have  stood,  to  the  sifting  of  testimony,  the  securing 
of  reliable  witnesses,  to  all  that  is  involved  in  Hume's  classic  criteria  for 
evaluating  an  alleged  miracle.  A  loose,  unscientific  application  of  this 
test  of  satisfaction-making  efficacy  would,  it  is  said,  open  the  door  to  the 
illusions  and  superstititions  of  the  ages.  It  would  be  particularly  facile 
in  the  hands  of  the  Christian  Scientist  and  the  Spiritualist. 

Now,  before  we  prosecute  this  alleged  comparison  between  Kant's 
postulates  and  the  Will-to-Believe,  it  is  important  to  ask  whether  James 
would  seriously  countenance  such  a  loose  application  of  his  thought.  It 
should  be  noted  again  that,  in  the  volume  referred  to,  he  carefully 
narrows  and  defines  his  case.  Pascal's  "wager"  is  not  recommended 
except  in  cases  of  forced,  living  options.  He  does  not  advocate  a  mere 
subjectivism,  or  the  giving  credence  to  "unproved  and  unquestioned 
statements  for  the  solace  and  private  pleasure  of  the  believer."1  He 
agrees  with  W.  K.  Clifford  that  this  would  be  a  desecration  of  belief  and 
that  "those  bred  in  the  rugged  a*d  manly  school  of  science  should  feel 
like  spewing  such  subjectivism  out  of  their  mouths."2  He  limits  the  case 
to  conditions  in  which  "  our  passional  nature  not  only  lawfully  may,  but 

1  The  Will-to-Believe  and  Other  Essays,  p.  8. 
3  Ibid.,  p.  7. 


PRACTICAL  REASON  FOR   THE   MORAL  AND  RELIGIOUS   LIFE  59 

must  decide  an  option  that  cannot  by  its  nature  be  decided  on  intellectual 
grounds;  for  to  say,  under  such  conditions,  'Do  not  decide,  but  leave  the 
question  open,'  is  itself  a  passionless  decision — just  like  deciding  yes  or 
no — and  is  attended  with  the  same  risk  of  losing  the  truth."1  The 
adoption  of  hypotheses  under  such  conditions  as  these  is  the  only  device 
compatible  with  the  purposive  character  of  our  thinking  and  conduct 
and  is  the  only  attitude  possible  for  practical  people  who  hold  the 
optimistic  attitude  "that  there  is  truth  and  that  it  is  the  destiny  of  our 
minds  to  attain  it."2  Such  conditions  and  options  are  necessarily  fast 
bound  up  with  the  problems  of  the  moral  and  religious  life. 

Now  this  is  strikingly  in  harmony  with  Kant's  fundamental  feeling 
that  by  means  of  the  practical  reason,  which  is  legislative  for  the  will, 
we  are  dealing  with  genuine  reality,  with  a  kingdom  of  ends.  The 
similarity  is  intensified  by  the  fact  that  with  Kant  also  this  is  a  region 
where  intellectual  grounds  fail  us,  while  the  absolute  law  of  our  moral 
life  forces  us  to  some  decision.  (We  are  not,  of  course,  discussing  the 
question  whether  Kant's  own  beliefs  are  essential  to  a  moral  life.) 
Kant  feels  profoundly  that  reality  itself  must  be  an  order  in  conformity 
with  ends,  with  the  realization  of  ideals.  As  the  pragmatist  would  say, 
it  must  be  consistent  with  the  purposive  character  of  all  human  thinking. 

A  closer  analysis  may,  however,  reveal  that  Kant  is  even  more 
pragmatic  and  less  subjectivistic  in  this  matter  than  James.  Our 
concern  with  the  latter  has  been  merely  to  give  him  a  fair  hearing.  It  is 
to  be  observed  that  for  Kant's  kingdom  of  ends  the  postulates  of  the 
practical  reason  are  not  optional  hypotheses  at  all.  They  are  postulates 
in  the  literal  sense  of  the  word — demands  made  by  the  moral  nature. 
Modern  men  may  not  agree  with  Kant  about  these  needs  of  the  moral 
life.  Some  have  expressed  their  disagreement.  But  that  is  another 
question.  We  are  not  discussing  the  grounds  or  the  end  of  morality  as 
a  question  on  its  own  merits.  Granted  the  moral  and  spiritual  needs 
which  Kant  so  earnestly  felt,  and  his  postulates  meet  the  tests  and 
verifications  which  the  pragmatist  would  impose.  Kant  presents  these 
needs  and  postulates  both  in  his  Canon  of  Pure  Reason  and  in  his  Critique 
of  Practical  Reason.  We  need  not  burden  the  discussion  with  parallel 
expressions  and  quotations.  We  may  note,  incidentally,  however,  that 
there  is  some  continuity  between  his  deduction  of  the  a  priori  categories 
of  the  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  and  his  justification  of  these  postulates  of 
the  practical  reason.  In  regard  to  the  former  he  has  shown  that  we 
construct  our  orderly  experience  in  response  to  the  demands  of  our  own 

1  Ibid.,  p.  ii.  *  Ibid.,  p.  12. 


60  PRAGMATIC   ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

nature.  In  the  second  Critique  we  learn  that  certain  ideas,  while  they 
are  not  objects  of  demonstrative  knowledge,  are  requisite  for  the  needs 
of  the  moral  order.  It  is  not  merely  that  for  optional  courses  we  may 
adopt  these  hypotheses  to  test  their  reality  in  the  sequel.  These  are 
demands  that  must  be  made  upon  experience.  There  is  nothing  slippery 
or  elusive  about  these  needs  as  Kant  conceives  them. 

Infinite  progress  demands,  as  its  condition,  the  persistence  of  per- 
sonality, of  individuality.  Nothing  but  personal  continuity  can  meet 
the  moral  demands  for  continuity  of  character.  Thus  immortality,  while 
not  susceptible  of  theoretical  proof,  "depends  on  an  a  priori  law  of 
unconditioned  validity.  It  is  inseparably  bound  up  with  the  moral  law.1 
In  the  first  Critique  he  had  already  indicated  that  teleological  considera- 
tions required  this  postulate:  "The  proofs  that  may  be  serviceable  for 
the  world  preserve  their  value  undiminished;  nay,  they  rather  gain  in 
clearness  and  unsophisticated  conviction  by  the  rejection  of  dogmatical 
assumptions.  For  reason  is  thus  confirmed  within  her  own  proper 
province,  namely  the  arrangement  of  ends,  which  nevertheless  is  at  the 
same  time  an  arrangement  of  nature."2 

Freedom  of  the  will  must  similarly  be  postulated  for  the  moral  life, 
for  without  it  there  could  be  no  categorical  ought.  This  is  not  the  place 
to  defend  or  criticize  Kant's  formal  ethics  in  comparison  with  hedonism, 
energism,  or  any  rival  school.  We  are  concerned  only  with  his  con- 
ception of  the  need  and  the  verification  of  postulates.  The  moral  law, 
commanding  us  to  act  from  motives  that  are  entirely  independent  of 
nature  (as  a  mechanical  order  already  developed  under  phenomenal 
conditions),  must  be  a  law  of  free  beings.  We  are  aware  of  the  criticism 
that  Kant  moves  here  in  a  circle.  He  insists  that  the  moral  law  pre- 
cludes the  operation  upon  the  will  of  anything  but  the  moral  law  itself. 
All  action  proceeding  from  a  motive  seems  to  be  action  in  which  the  will 
is  determined  by  some  natural  (sensual)  impulse.  It  would  seem, 
therefore,  that  we  must  will  the  moral  law  without  a  motive.  But  Kant 
solves  the  dilemma  by  keeping  clearly  in  mind  a  distinction  between 
sensuous  desires  as  motives  and  the  single  motive  of  "reverence  for  the 
moral  law."3  Kant  is  plainly  forced  to  a  pragmatic  attitude  in  this 
matter  of  freedom  and  his  break  with  mechanical  causality  bears  close 
kinship  with  the  spirit  of  James.  Having  specified  two  kinds  of  freedom 
— practical  belonging  to  the  phenomenal,  and  transcendental  belonging 

1  Watson,  Selections,  p.  295. 

a  Critique  of  the  Paralogisms,  2d  ed.,  (Mahaffy),  III,  288. 

3  Watson,  Selections,  p.  229. 


PRACTICAL  REASON   FOR   THE   MORAL   AND  RELIGIOUS   LIFE  6 1 

to  the  intelligible  world — he  ascribes  to  man  not  the  first  only  but  also 
the  second.  Man  has  the  "power  of  inaugurating  a  state  of  things  by 
himself,  a  spontaneity  which  can  of  itself  begin  to  act  without  the 
necessity  of  premising  another  cause."1  This  sounds  like  an  expression 
of  James's  attitude: 

Our  acts,  our  turning-places,  where  we  seem  to  ourselves  to  make  ourselves 
and  grow,  are  the  parts  of  the  world  to  which  we  are  closest,  the  parts  of 
which  our  knowledge  is  the  most  intimate  and  complete.  Why  should  we  not 
take  them  at  their  face  value  ?  Why  may  they  not  be  the  actual  turning-places 
and  growing-places  which  they  seem  to  be,  of  the  world — why  not  the  workshop 
of  being,  where  we  catch  fact  in  the  making,  so  that  nowhere  may  the  world 
grow  in  any  other  kind  of  way  than  this  ?a 

God  must  be  postulated  as  a  requisite  for  the  moral  life,  for  without 
such  a  supreme  cause  happiness  and  morality  could  not  be  harmonized; 
the  highest  good  would  be  incapable  of  realization.  Reverting  again  to 
the  first  Critique: 

As  we  are  bound  by  reason  to  conceive  ourselves  as  belonging  necessarily 
to  such  a  world,  though  the  senses  present  us  with  nothing  but  phenomena,  we 
shall  have  to  accept  the  other  world  as  the  result  of  our  conduct  in  this  world  of 
sense  (in  which  we  see  no  such  connection  between  goodness  and  happiness) 
and  therefore  as  to  us  a  future  world.  Hence  it  follows  that  God  and  a  future 
life  are  two  suppositions  which,  according  to  the  principle  of  pure  reason, 
cannot  be  separated  from  the  obligation  which  that  very  reason  imposes 
upon  us.3 

In  pragmatic  phraseology  these  ideas  find  their  verification  in  their 
necessity  for  the  ends  which  reason  must  assume  for  the  realization  of  its 
highest  ideals.  But  more  particularly  in  the  second  Critique,  God  is  the 
supremely  good  and  omnipotent  will  that  guarantees  the  realization  of 
the  highest  good:  "It  is  only  in  the  ideal  of  the  supreme  original  good 
that  reason  can  find  the  ground  of  the  practically  necessary  connection 
of  the  two  elements  of  the  highest  derivative  good  (morality  and  its 
corresponding  blessedness)."4 

Probably  no  part  of  Kant's  work  comes  nearer  to  the  true  pragmatic 
attitude  than  his  treatment  of  these  religious  hypotheses.  In  regard  to 
religion  and  ethics  pragmatism  seems  in  the  role  of  working  out  thor- 
oughly Kant's  problem  of  the  relation  of  knowledge  to  faith  and  the 
significance  of  his  saying,  "I  must  remove  knowledge  to  make  room 
for  faith,"  is  being  realized  today  by  such  religious  thinkers  as  Ritschl 

1  Critique  of  the  Paralogisms,  ad  ed.,  (Mahaffy),  III,  371. 

2  Pragmatism,  p.  287.  3  Mueller's  trans.,  p.  651. 
«  Critique  of  the  Paralogisms,  III,  534. 


62  PRAGMATIC   ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

and  Hermann  as  never  before.  We  may  not  be  able  to  find  in  Kant 
knowledge  in  all  spheres  reduced  to  something  like  faith — as  has  been 
charged  to  be  the  design  of  pragmatism — but  in  the  sphere  of  religious 
conviction  the  parallel  seems  to  be  complete.  It  may  appear  that  the 
mantle  of  Kant  has  fallen  upon  the  pragmatist  rather  than  upon  the 
neo-Hegelians.  Kant  says  explicitly:  "It  is  absolutely  needful  that  one 
be  convinced  of  the  existence  of  God;  but  it  is  not  needful  that  one 
demonstrate  it.  What  way  of  conviction  is  there  apart  from  logical 
proof?  That  of  the  moral  courage  of  conviction."1  The  marked 
similarity  of  this  to  the  Ritschlian  contention  that  religion  is  not  derived 
from  our  knowledge  of  God,  but  rather  from  our  human  need  which 
reaches  out  for  a  supply,  need  scarcely  be  emphasized.  Kant  practically 
"rests  his  case"  for  the  proof  of  God  on  this  great  fact  that  the  concept 
gives  to  the  moral  law  a  dynamic.  He  holds  that  the  concept  of  God 
does  not  pertain  to  physics  but  to  morals:  "If  a  physicist  takes  refuge 
in  God  as  the  author  of  things,  it  is  a  confession  that  he  has  come  to  an 
end  with  his  philosophy."2  It  is  from  the  practical  point  of  view  that 
the  concept  of  God  has  its  great  significance.  It  gives  the  human  heart 
peace  and  security.  The  world  of  feeling  cannot  hold  together  without 
its  dominant,  unifying  power.  It  is  an  emotional  necessity. 

The  close  correspondence  of  Kant's  conception  of  God  with  pragmatic 
thought  may  be  traced  in  the  debates,  the  cross-fire  of  question  and 
answer  that  has  been  running  through  current  philosophical  journals. 
John  E.  Russel's  reply  to  O.  C.  Quick  in  defense  of  pragmatism  (which 
Russel  confesses  he  long  misunderstood)  is  almost  a  verbal  paraphrase 
or  expansion  of  Kant's  words:  "What  content  of  truth  is  there  left  in  his 
idea  of  God,  when  there  has  been  subtracted  from  that  idea  all  that 
connotes  value  for  our  human  lives  in  the  way  of  putting  us  into  experi- 
entially  good  relations  with  God,  such  as  trust,  reverence,  obedience, 
expectancy,  satisfied  wants  ?"3  Kant  is  explicitly  emphatic  in  more  than 
one  place  in  disclaiming  any  objective  reality  of  God  to  which  our  idea 
can  correspond  in  any  other  way  than  that  which  signifies  that  these 
expressions  stand  for  "concrete  experiences  of  realized  purposes,  satisfied 
wants,  sustained  moral  endeavors,  comforted  sorrows,  harmonized 
discords  in  thoughts  or  feelings,  and  the  peace  of  mind  that  comes  when 
our  total  experiences  are  brought  into  unity."4  It  is  not  Kant,  then, 
who  has  been  short-circuited,  but  idealistic  systems  since  Kant.  It  is 
just  Kant's  moral  and  religious  attitude  that  is  now  being  reproduced 

1  Hartenstein,  Kant,  II,  205.  *  Mind,  XXXV,  548. 

*  Dialectic  7  (Paulsen,  Kant,  p.  288).  <  Ibid.,  p.  549. 


PRACTICAL  REASON  FOR   THE   MORAL  AND  RELIGIOUS   LIFE  63 

and  intensified  in  the  conviction  that  life  and  action  are  deeper  than 
logical  processes,  or  rather  that  logical  processes  take  their  rise  from 
these.  Thought  begins  when  life  furnishes  the  data  and  there  is  nothing 
deeper  in  cognition  than  the  fundamental  needs,  interests,  and  instincts 
of  the  mind  or  rather  the  life.  "  Religion  does  not  originate  in  thought, 
but  in  what  we  experience."  Kant  freed  practical  faith  from  rational- 
ism, as  he  planned  to  do,  and  opened  to  religion  a  free  field  for  develop- 
ment in  life  and  action.  Pragmatism  follows  his  lead  in  giving  to  our 
moral  and  religious  instincts  right  of  way.  The  growing  conviction 
among  religious  thinkers  that  their  chief  concern  is  not  in  creedal 
statements  but  in  conduct  and  that  religion  finds  its  great  test  there,  is 
in  the  direct  line  of  Kant's  influence.  Value,  need,  endeavor — these  are 
the  words  that  ring  the  changes.  There  is  scarcely  anything  farther 
from  the  truth  than  the  feeling  in  some  circles  that  the  pragmatic 
attitude  makes  for  irreverence  toward  "the  eternal  verities,"  however 
that  phrase  may  be  explained,  or  than  the  consequent  disposition  in  the 
same  circles  to  turn  back  to  idealistic  systems  for  a  fancied  support  and 
refuge  for  waning  orthodox  standards  of  religious  faith.  It  is  pragmatism 
with  its  open  door  for  belief  and  strenuous  effort — effort  encouraged  by 
the  conviction  that  our  earnest  lives  count  for  something,  change  some- 
thing, really  establish  something;  that  the  world  is  in  the  making  and 
that  part  of  that  making  is  ours,  that  furnishes  a  true  dynamic  for  moral 
and  religious  conduct. 

The  one  criticism  upon  Kant  here  is,  again,  that  his  distinction 
between  matters  of  faith  and  understanding  is  too  sharp,  as  it  was  in  the 
contrast  of  sense  and  understanding.  The  separation  is  once  more 
arbitrary  and  fictitious.  Either  knowledge  will  discredit  belief  or 
belief,  verified  in  fact,  in  determining  values,  must  ripen  into  knowledge. 
The  two  are  mutually  interactive,  parts  of  one  and  the  same  process  of 
adjustment  and  growth.  Beliefs  as  postulates  lead  to  knowledge  and 
practically,  therefore,  amount  to  knowledge.  They  do  not  occupy  a 
realm  to  themselves.  To  say  that  we  take  the  problem  of  God  out  of 
the  cognitive  sphere  and  place  it  over  in  the  region  of  voluntarism  may 
serve  certain  purposes  by  way  of  contrast  or  emphasis,  but  it  discredits 
the  cognitive  process  too  much  and  does  just  what  the  whole  pragmatic 
movement  inveighs  against  and  sets  itself  to  correct.  So-called  prag- 
matists  have  themselves  fallen  into  this  error.  It  is  possible  that  Kant 
meant  merely  to  shift  the  emphasis  from  a  false  intellectualism  and 
certainly  his  position  will  tend  to  check  not  only  absolutism  but  every 
form  of  crude  materialistic  intellectualism. 


64  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

Granting  that  Kant's  system  seems  to  point  in  two  directions — 
toward  idealism  on  one  side  and  toward  pragmatism  on  the  other — the 
idealists,  the  system-builders  who  took  the  first  path,  confidently 
re-creating  and  explaining  the  world  in  terms  of  thought  until  they 
reached  the  denial  of  the  very  starting-point  of  criticism,  courageous- 
ly holding  that  "in  the  self-comprehension  of  the  idea  in  the  form 
of  a  concept  the  entire  evolution  of  the  world  has  reached  its  goal," 
should  have  noted  the  later  date  of  the  second  Critique.  The  second 
path  which  leads  away  from  any  "logical  autocracy,"  which  regards  the 
intellect  as  only  one  of  the  factors  in  the  life-process,  which  clears  the 
way  for  the  categories  of  our  volitional  nature,  would  seem  to  hold  a 
more  direct  lineage  from  Kant  in  the  maturity  of  his  thought. 


THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 

In  Kant's  contrast  of  things-in-themselves  with  appearances  we  have 
the  climax  of  the  contradiction  between  the  transcendental  and  the 
functional  and  the  most  serious  gap  between  him  and  modern  prag- 
matism. It  is  hopeless  to  seek  to  eliminate  the  transcendental  or  even 
the  transcendent  from  Kant's  system  without  eliminating  Kant  himself. 
That  Dinge  an  sick  exist  as  the  background  of  reality  and  the  real  cause 
of  our  sensations  was  undoubtedly  his  thought.  Yet  it  is  doubtful  if, 
because  of  this  fact,  full  justice  has  been  done  to  the  impetus  which  the 
Kantian  movement  gave  to  the  modern  functional  conception  of  reality. 

Kant  holds  that  all  knowable  reality,  all  objects  dependable  for 
verification,  fall  within  experience.  His  own  criticism  of  ontology 
would  apply  legitimately  to  his  Dinge  an  sich,  for  in  accordance  with 
his  whole  examination  of  knowledge  he  would  agree  with  the  pragmatist 
in  asking  what  really  significant  and  verifiable  meaning  can  things, 
objects,  existences  have  if  the  pragmatic  meaning  is  rejected  ?  As  Kant 
would  phrase  it,  if  the  categories  cannot  be  applied  to  things-in- 
themselves,  what  meaning  can  they  have  ?  He  never  consciously  and 
explicitly  looked  this  question  in  the  face  in  its  positive  aspect  or  he 
would  have  realized  that  true  reality  may  be  given  in  just  this  experience 
which  he  has  labored  to  account  for;  that  real  objects  as  well  as  phe- 
nomenal exist  only  as  they  enter  into  our  activity,. our  experience. 

Now  it  might  conceivably  be  held,  as  Raub  suggested,1  that  some 
pragmatists  would  not  deny  the  existence  of  things-in-themselves  and, 
in  that  case,  there  would  be  no  break,  for  Kant  teaches  throughout  that 
we  do  not,  in  our  intellectual  activity,  deal  with  them  at  all,  expect  in  a 
negative  way.  Such  pragmatists  would  scarcely  be  advanced  one  whit 
beyond  the  great  German.  Kant  was  alive  to  the  fact  that  the  problem 
of  knowledge,  as  he  inherited  it,  involved  two  distinct  questions — the 
possibility  of  a  reference  to  reality  lying  beyond  the  experience  of  the 
one  who  knows  and  existing  on  its  own  account  and,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  nature  of  knowledge  as  an  experience  and  the  peculiar  part  played 
within  it  by  the  sensuous  data  and  the  governing  principles  of  thought, 
respectively.  We  have  assumed  throughout  this  study  that  pragmatic 
standards  necessitate  the  uniting  of  the  two. 

1  Studies  in  Phil,  and  Psych.  (Carman  Memorial  Volume),  p.  214. 

65 


66  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS  IN  KANT'S  PHILOSOPHY 

To  say,  "Pragmatism  does  not  deny  their  existence,  but  it  does  not 
discuss  the  question,"1  that  we  know  nothing  of  ultimate  realities  and 
turn  them  over  to  metaphysics,  is  a  cavalier  dodge  of  real  difficulties  and 
would,  of  course,  square  up  Kant  immediately.  Unfortunately,  this 
does  not  suffice.  Pragmatism,  no  more  than  Kant,  can  leave  the 
metaphysical  question  alone.  To  place  external  reality  as  a  "chaos" 
off  by  itself  gets  no  farther  than  to  leave  it  as  an  "unknown."  Just  as 
with  Kant,  so  with  such  pragmatists  one  may  ask:  If  the  mind  is 
incapable  of  judging  as  to  the  nature  of  external  reality,  on  what  grounds 
can  such  a  "chaos"  be  posited?  To  turn  over  to  metaphysics  any 
residual  question  would  seem  to  mean,  if  we  analyze  out  the  attitude 
expressed  by  the  phrase,  that  there  is,  after  all,  some  distinct,  separate 
region  of  thought  and  existence,  some  sphere  of  ontology,  beyond  the 
range  of  our  problems.  But  this  would  be  to  continue  the  false  separa- 
tion of  worlds  against  which  the  pragmatic  movement  has  launched  its 
whole  force.  It  would  be  Kant's  mistake  implicitly  repeated.  As  a 
pause  in  reading  is  as  significant,  for  meaning,  as  the  pronouncing  and 
grouping  of  phrases,  so  in  our  systematic  treatment  of  problems  of 
philosophy  a  break  or  abrupt  stopping-place,  with  the  implication  that 
we  should  go  on  if  we  could,  would  imply  again  an  ultimate  reality 
non-experiential.  If  Raub  and  those  he  represents  mean  simply  that 
Kant  and  pragmatists  alike  have  turned  away  from  empty  debates  about 
the  void  where  thinking  ceases,  very  good,  but  we  have  moved  no 
farther  than  we  were.  For  pragmatists  who  "  do  not  deny  their  existence 
but  do  not  discuss  the  matter"  no  better  statement  could  be  asked  than 
Kant's.  Indeed  his  position  has  well  been  cited  as  fortifying  an  attitude 
of  antipathy  to  pure  intellectualism : 

The  conception  of  a  noumenon  is  not  self-contradictory;  for  we  cannot  say 

that  sense  is  the  only  possible  mode  of  perception We  give  the  name  of 

noumena  to  all  objects  to  which  sensuous  perception  does  not  extend,  just  for 
the  purpose  of  showing  that  such  knowledge  is  not  all  that  the  understanding 
can  think.  Yet  in  the  end  we  have  to  acknowledge  that  we  cannot  understand 
even  the  possibility  of  such  noumena,  and  that  the  sphere  of  knowledge  which 
we  thus  reserve  beyond  the  sphere  of  phenomena  is  for  us  quite  empty.  In 
short,  we  have  an  understanding  that  problematically  extends  beyond  the 
phenomenal,  but  no  perception  and  not  even  the  conception  of  a  possible 
perception  of  objects  beyond  the  sphere  of  sense,  on  which  the  understanding 

might  be  used  assertorially If  we  choose  to  call  it  a  noumenon,  in  order 

to  show  that  we  do  not  represent  it  as  sensuous,  we  are  at  liberty  to  do  so.     But 

1  Studies  in  Phil,  and  Psych.  (Carman  Memorial  Volume),  p.  214. 


THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES  67 

as  we  cannot  apply  to  it  any  one  of  the  categories,  the  conception  of  it  is  for 
us  quite  empty  and  meaningless.1 

Just  to  leave  things-in-themselves  alone,  what  more  is  needed  than 
this?  But,  as  Bergson  remarks,  if  we  know  nothing  of  things-in- 
themselves,  "How  can  we  affirm  their  existence  even  as  problematic? 
If  the  unknowable  reality  projects  into  our  perceptive  faculty  a  sensuous 
manifold,  capable  of  fitting  into  it  exactly,  is  it  not  by  that  very  fact 
in  part  known?"2 

Again,  as  to  our  possible  attitude  toward  these  unwieldy  things-in- 
themselves,  opponents  of  pragmatism  might  defend  the  view  that 
certain  pragmatists — notably  James — maintain  at  times  a  naive  realism 
and  that  in  this  respect  Kant  has  the  advantage  of  them  for  an  ultimate 
philosophical  system.  Such  expressions  in  the  pragmatist  may,  how- 
ever, justly  be  regarded  as  terminology  inspired  by  their  perfervid 
opposition  to  absolutism.  The  real  connection  of  pragmatism  at  this 
point  is  probably  to  be  found  in  its  voluntaristic  elements,  the  historical 
transmission  of  which  may  be  taken  as  coming  from  Kant  through 
Schopenhauer.  As  for  realism  and  idealism,  neither  Kant  nor  the 
pragmatist  need  deny  his  obligation  to  the  former  for  the  working 
distinction  between  thing  and  idea  nor  to  the  latter  for  the  conception  of 
the  dependence  of  our  reality  upon  our  thought.  Pragmatism  is  only 
"a  new  name  for  old  ways  of  thinking."  The  pragmatist  would  insist, 
however,  that  this  dependence  of  reality  upon  our  thought  be  under- 
stood in  a  voluntaristic  sense. 

In  the  doctrine  of  a  constructed  experience  we  have  the  starting- 
point,  at  least,  of  a  conception  of  reality  which,  while  it  has  not  been 
thoroughly  elaborated,  may  justly  be  attributed  in  large  measure  to 
Kant's  influence.  The  legitimate  consequences  of  Kant's  position 
would  prevent  his  making  any  assertions — positive  or  negative — 
lending  strength  to  either  a  realistic  or  absolutistic  definition  of  reality. 
It  may  be  proper  to  mention  again  that  Kant  disowned  "idealism 
proper,"  regarding  it  as  an  "extravagant"  doctrine.  He  held  that  we 
cannot  determine  reality  by  the  understanding  alone: 

The  position  of  all  true  idealists,  from  the  Eleatics  down  to  Bishop  Berkeley, 
is  contained  in  the  following  statement:  All  knowledge  acquired  through  the 
senses  is  a  mere  illusion,  and  the  truth  exists  only  in  the  ideas  furnished  by  pure 
understanding  and  reason.  The  principle  that  governs  and  determines  the 

1  Meiklejohn's  trans.,  pp.  187,  206. 
1  Op.  cit.,  p.  205. 


68  PRAGMATIC   ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

whole  of  my  idealism  is,  on  the  contrary,  that  any  knowledge  of  things  that 
proceeds  from  pure  understanding  or  reason  is  a  mere  illusion,  and  that  truth 
is  found  in  experience  alone.1 

In  thus  disclaiming  the  power  of  ideas  to  reach  intuitively  real  being,  as 
Descartes,  Malebranche,  and  Leibnitz  held,  and  limiting  them  to  a 
formal  application,  the  function  of  merely  providing  the  laws  which 
connect  phenomena  and  bring  unity  into  the  multiplicity  of  experience? 
he  gives  us  a  point  of  differentiation  from  absolute  idealism  and  starts 
us  on  the  road  to  pragmatism,  at  any  rate.  Caird  was  right  in  saying : 

The  legitimate  development  of  Criticism  involves  the  final  rejection  of  the 
thing-in-itself.  How  can  anything  come  within  consciousness  which  is  essen- 
tially different  from  consciousness?  How  can  we  think  that  which,  ex  hypo- 
thesi,  is  unthinkable?  How  can  thought  discern  its  own  absolute  limits 
without  emancipating  itself  from  them  ?  How  can  it  know  the  phenomenal  as 
such,  without  a  glimpse  of  the  noumenon  ?2 

But  the  pragmatist  would  deny  that  it  necessarily  follows  that  we  are 
"carried  onward  from  transcendental  to  absolute  idealism."3 

The  truth  is  that  the  problem  of  things-in-themselves  is  not  Kant's 
real  problem  at  all.  It  is  a  rationalistic  heirloom  which,  for  the  com- 
parison of  Kant  with  pragmatism  or  for  any  significant  study,  must  be 
locked  away  in  the  "Museum  of  Curios."  Yet  to  draw  as  near  as 
possible  to  the  real  meaning  of  Kant  as  against  the  absolutist  we  may 
notice  that  his  handling  of  matter  or  substance  (formerly  about  synony- 
mous with  the  ultimate  substrate)  is  more  dynamic,  even  when  we  hold 
him  to  the  literal  word,  than  that  of  precedent  absolutists  like  Spinoza 
or  modern  idealists  like  Hegel  or  Bradley.  We  have  already  seen  his 
functional  treatment  of  the  ego  or  soul  which  Descartes  made  a  part  of 
real  substance.  When  he  comes  to  deal  with  matter  in  a  scientific  way 
he  gives  a  dynamic  theory  of  it.  The  laws  of  matter  and  motion  cor- 
respond to  the  laws  of  thought  established  in  his  first  Critique — laws  of 
conservation,  inertia,  action  and  reaction,  and  continuity.''  It  seems 
highly  significant  that  in  dealing  with  substance  he  treats  these  not  as 
laws  of  an  absolute  reality  at  all,  of  a  material  substance  outside  the 
mind,  but  merely  as  constant  relations  between  phenomena  in  space 
and  time.  Here,  too,  the  mind,  by  its  forms  and  categories,  constructs 
an  objective  world  governed  by  its  own  laws.  When  we  contrast  this 

1  Prolegomena,  p.  147. 

2  The  Philosophy  of  Kant  (one  vol.  work),  p.  652. 

3  Ibid. 

*  Metaphysische  Anfangsgriinde  der  Wissenschaft,  III,  "Mechanics." 


THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES  69 

treatment  of  substance  itself  with  that  of  the  metaphysicians  of  his  day 
we  seem  to  get  means  of  differentiation  that  afford  food  for  thought  as 
indicating  in  what  direction  Kant  is  pointing,  if  we  are  seeking  to  under- 
stand the  real  spirit  of  his  philosophy. 

Kant  and  the  pragmatist  agree  that  the  only  reality  we  can  definitely 
know  is  a  reality  either  given  in  or  constructed  in  experience.  Prag- 
matism, of  course,  is  not  committed  to  saying  that  we  know  reality  at 
all,  but  rather  that  our  knowledge  is  one  of  the  functions  in  reality. 
Knowledge  is  not  a  process  of  referring  to  something  external.  It  is 
a  process  going  on  within  the  object.  And  we  have  been  seeking  to 
emphasize  the  significant  fact  that,  in  contradistinction  from  the  ration- 
alists who  made  light  of  experience  as  confused  knowledge,  or  as  mere 
appearance,  to  use  Bradley's  phrase,  Kant  is  really  concerned  to  prove 
just  the  reality  of  the  world  as  it  appears  to  us.  His  point  of  view  is 
that  of  science,  seeking  to  establish  the  validity  of  our  knowledge  of 
phenomena. 

In  connection  with  this  is  the  further  fact,  also  pregnant  with 
pragmatic  meaning,  that  he  rejects  the  overemphasis  upon  pure  intel- 
lectualism  that  had  been  current  since  the  dawn  of  the  Renaissance. 
In  contending  for  the  worth  of  man  as  determined  more  by  his  will  than 
by  the  understanding,  he  foreshadowed  the  attitude  of  the  pragmatist 
and  suggested  hints,  not  elaborated  to  be  sure,  of  the  real  dynamic 
character  of  reality.  It  was  from  him  that  Schopenhauer  took  his 
interpretation  of  the  relations  between  Dinge  an  sick  and  phenomena 
which  is  approached  by  the  viewpoint  of  such  thinkers  as  Schiller. 

It  was  notably  Fichte  who  showed  that  things-in-themselves  are 
really  inconsistent  with  Kant's  presuppositions.  In  comment  upon 
Fichte's  attitude  Jacobi  declared  that  we  cannot  enter  Kant's  system 
without  things-in-themselves  and  we  cannot  remain  in  it  if  we  retain 
them.  The  latter  remarked  with  pungent  wit  that  Kant's  thing-in- 
itself  aas  in  itself  real,  but  unknown  and  unknowable  by  us  enjoys  a 
position  of  otium  cum  dignitate"*  We  may  add  that  it  is  little  better 
than  non-existence.  Once  more  Kant  remarks:  "The  transcendental 
object,  which  may  be  the  ground  of  this  appearance  which  we  call 
matter  is  a  mere  somewhat,  and  we  could  not  understand  what  it  is 
even  if  someone  could  tell  us."2  Kant  would  seem  to  agree  with 
Fullerton,  that  "The  only  external  world  about  which  it  can  be  profitable 
to  talk  at  all  is  an  external  world  revealed  in  experience."3  Pragmatism 

*  Werke,  III,  74. 

a  Meiklejohn's  trans.,  p.  380.  J  Mind,  XXXIV,  380. 


70  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

scarcely  goes  farther  than  to  assume  that  an  external  world  about  which 
it  is  not  profitable  even  to  talk  does  not  exist  for  any  inquiry  or  interest. 

How  shall  we,  on  Kant's  own  principles,  pass  from  ideas  to  things- 
in-themselves  ?  Kant  assumes  that  the  latter  affect  us  and  that  sensa- 
tions as  effects  point  back  to  ultimate  things  as  causes.  But  he  has 
himself  made  this  impossible  by  granting  to  the  law  of  causality  only 
empirical  validity.  Absolute  phenomenalism,  rather  than  absolute 
idealism,  would  be  a  truer  inference  from  his  system  if  we  must  be 
pushed  on  to  absolutism  of  any  sort.  As  Raub  says,  "In  the  final 
analysis  the  phenomena  are  really  noumena.  Truth  with  Kant  as  with 
the  pragmatist  is  necessarily  a  relation  between  different  parts  of  experi- 
ence."1 Our  world  of  ideas  constitutes  our  only  reality.  But  this  does 
not  involve  Berkeleyan  idealism  or  any  other  kind  necessarily.  It 
remained  for  pragmatism  to  clear  up  some  of  the  obscurity  in  this  word 
ideas,  combining  with  it,  as  did  Schopenhauer,  the  significance  of  the 
end-striving  or  volitional  aspects  of  our  mental  life.  Ideas  are  not 
entities  with  an  existence  of  their  own.  There  are  no  such  things  as 
pure  mental  states.  Ideas  are  a  part  of  the  practical  life-process,  or  in 
other  words  of  developing  reality  itself.  The  meaning  of  ideas  is  to  be 
sought  in  the  conditions,  actual  or  prospective,  of  our  struggle  to  live 
and  develop.  Similarly  our  judgments  arise  from  activity  and  are  true 
if  they  work  for  the  attainment  or  the  alteration  of  experienced  values. 
"The  truth  of  a  state  of  mind  means  the  function  of  a  leading  that  is 
worth  while."  This  is  what  ideas,  thinking,  are  for.  Consequently  no 
object  may  properly  be  said  to  exist  except  as  it  enters  or  may  enter  into 
our  experience  for  good  or  ill. 

Pragmatism  shows  that  our  knowledge  is  not,  to  use  Kant's  own 
unfortunate  illustration,  like  an  island  standing  in  a  boundless  and 
impenetrable  ocean  of  reality,  from  which  it  is  forever  shut  off  by  a  mist 
or  fog.  Our  ever-growing  experience  and  our  experienced  relations  with 
other  beings  are  reality  itself.  The  real  is  just  what  we  experience  it  as 
in  our  absorption  and  assimilation  of  it  as  our  knowledge  and  life  expand. 
Schiller  holds,  as  did  Kant,  that  we  help  make  the  outer  world  known  to 
us.  Do  we  also  make  or  alter  therewith  a  reality  independent  of  our 
knowing?  Not  independent,  the  pragmatist  would  answer.  We  do 
alter  the  world.  The  outer  world,  whatever  that  expression  may  con- 
tain, is  no  more  unrelated  to  us,  generally  speaking,  than  is  a  refreshing 
summer  shower  unrelated  to  the  parched  vegetation  and  the  suffering 
humanity  to  whose  relief  it  comes.  Indeed  has  it  not  been  seriously  held 

10p.  cit.,  p.  215. 


THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES  71 

that  the  restoration  of  our  northern  forests  might  help  to  bring  back  and 
multiply  the  refreshing  showers  by  the  very  establishment  of  need  on 
our  side  ?  Both  terms  of  the  relation  or  of  the  related  experience  are 
altered.  Thinking  is  a  mode  of  interacting.  We,  after  knowing, 
influence  the  course  of  the  world  in  other  ways  than  we  would  have  done 
without  our  knowledge.  The  known  object  is  changed  by  the  fact  of  its 
being  known.  It  passes  by  that  fact  into  new  relations  with  other 
objects.  It  was  one  of  Kant's  great  services  to  show  that  knowing  is 
not  a  mere  process  of  revealing  objects  but  rather  an  act  in  which  we 
think  about  them,  reflect  upon  them,  and  consequently  an  act  partly 
constitutive  and  determinative  of  their  character  as  objects.  We 
cannot  speak  of  independent  reality  that  is  merely  discovered  by  our 
knowledge.  Knowing  is  not  an  intellectual  abstraction  but  a  "prelude 
to  doing."  Schiller  says  the  marmots  reveal  themselves  by  their  anxious 
whistling  before  they  are  as  yet  really  known  to  the  Alpine  intruder. 
They  fear  being  known  because  this  is  merely  a  phase  in  the  course  of 
action  that  may  involve  death  to  them.  Even  so-called  inanimate 
objects  are  subject  to  the  same  criterion.  The  awareness  of  a  stone 
consists  in,  and  is  brought  about  by,  its  capacity  for  use  in  human 
construction.  "To  use  and  to  be  used  includes  to  know  and  to  be 
known."1 

Kant's  inherited  presuppositions  led  him  to  retain  a  supposed 
separation  of  object  and  ideas,  of  experience  as  we  have  it  and  reality 
itself.  He  retained  this  separation  as  an  empty  form  back  in  his  thought, 
much  as  people  who  have  outgrown  their  religious  creeds  retain  them  in 
an  isolated  region  of  their  minds,  if  we  may  be  allowed  so  faulty  an 
expression.  Technically,  with  Kant,  thought  remains  a  merely  sub- 
jective principle  whose  function  is  exhausted  in  bringing  order  and  unity 
into  consciousness — order  and  unity  assumed  without  a  standard. 
Ideas  are  restricted  to  phenomena.  Technically,  such  an  experience  as 
this  affords  would  not  be  real  experience  at  all,  but  a  matter  of  mere 
representations.  But  the  spirit  of  Kant's  philosophy  goes  beyond  this 
separation.  It  is  through  the  interpretation,  criticism,  and  completion 
of  his  doctrine  that  we  have  come  to  see  the  true  nature  of  experience, 
the  true  function  of  ideas  as  that  of  connecting  mind  with  objects.  We 
do  not  have  a  subject  here  and  an  object  there,  the  mind  on  one  side  and 
things  on  the  other.  Experience  is  a  real  thing  itself,  a  concrete  expres- 
sion of  reality,  in  which  subject  and  object  play  their  organic  parts.  In 
the  language  of  J.  E.  Creighton: 

1  Studies  in  Humanism,  p.  443. 


72  PRAGMATIC  ELEMENTS   IN   KANT'S   PHILOSOPHY 

Not  only  is  there  no  object  without  a  subject,  but  it  is  equally  true  that 
there  is  no  subject  without  an  object.  There  is  no  independent  object  outside 
of  thought,  and  there  is  no  thought-in-itself  standing  apart  and  in  abstraction 
from  the  contents  of  experience  and  entering  into  only  occasional  relations  to 
this  content.  We  do  not  have  first  a  mind  and  then  become  conscious  of  our 
relations  to  objects,  but  to  have  a  mind  is  just  to  stand  in  those  self-conscious 
relations  to  the  objective  realities  P1 

We  can  readily  understand  how  hard  it  was  for  Kant  to  break  away 
from  this  dualism  when  we  see  not  only  the  representational  theory  of 
knowledge  that  goes  with  crude  realism  but  also  the  interaction  view  of 
mind  in  modern  psychology  harboring  the  same  conception  of  a  "con- 
sciousness thing,  shut  up  within  itself,  and  related  to  other  independently 
existing  things."  Even  the  theory  of  parallelism  in  psychology,  while 
seeking  to  avoid  metaphysical  difficulties,  still  treasures  unconsciously 
the  view  of  two  separate  entities.  Pragmatism,  while  not  claiming 
absolute  novelty  in  this  respect,  has  done  good  service  in  revising  all 
philosophical  presuppositions  regarding  the  functions  of  subject  and 
object  in  experience.  And  it  is  just  one  of  Kant's  permanent  contri- 
butions to  have  shown  that  subject  and  object  develop  from  within 
experience  itself.  His  failure  to  give  to  experience  the  extensive  range 
which  properly  belongs  to  it  as  embracing  reality  in  itself  does  not  lessen 
the  value  of  this  contribution,  for  it  is  evident  that  the  experience  which 
he  really  treasured  in  his  deepest  meaning  is  the  same  experience  which 
modern  pragmatism  accepts,  not  merely  as  phenomenal,  but  as  reality 
itself.  Kant's  real  center  of  gravity  falls,  as  does  that  of  the  pragmatist, 
within  the  mind's  activity,  or  better,  within  the  activity  of  social  indi- 
viduals, with  objects  entering  as  real  and  constitutive  elements  into 
its  nature. 

Pragmatism  is  indebted  in  some  measure,  as  has  been  said,  to 
Schopenhauer,  whose  voluntaristic  terminology  strove  at  least  to 
separate  freedom,  causality,  and  the  unity  of  all  life  from  rationalistic 
or  intellectualistic  ingredients — to  recognize  purposive  factors  in  our 
mental  life.  Pragmatists  are  even  more  averse  than  was  he  to  the 
Hegelian  use  of  ideas,  as  the  wrong  line  of  development  from  Kant,  to 
evolve  and  perfect  his  true  meaning.  Pragmatism  accepts  voluntarism, 
but  combines  it  with  empiricism,  with  a  true  scientific  attitude.  This 
is  not  the  old  materialistic  empiricism  which  in  its  way  was  as  dogmatic 
as  rationalism,  for  pragmatism  recognizes  no  real  bodies  as  fixed  data 
any  more  than  it  accepts  categories  forged  and  "  fulminated  before  nature 
began."  Pragmatism  constantly  introduces  the  criteria  of  values. 
Indeed  all  existential  judgments  are  subjected  by  its  method  to  this 

1  Philosophical  Review,  XII,  600. 


THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES  73 

touchstone  and  become  in  the  end  judgments  of  value.  It  is  in  bridging 
the  gap  between  Kant  and  empiricism  that  one  of  the  chief  services  of 
pragmatism  is  to  consist.  Empiricism  has  always  labored  hard  over 
Kant's  position  and  has  never  been  able  to  concede  that  the  outer  world 
is  not  found  by  and  taken  up  into  our  consciousness  fixed  and  given,  but 
is  partly  created  by  our  apparatus  of  perception.  Empiricism  has 
fostered  the  illusion  of  the  tabula  rasa.  It  has  failed  to  do  justice  to  the 
activity  of  the  organism  in  the  act  of  knowing,  to  the  fact  that  we  do 
not  merely  receive  and  record  but  that  we  react  in  modes  decided  by  our 
own  nature  and  directed  toward  the  accomplishment  of  our  own  ends  or 
ideals.  It  was  this  fault  that  led  Kant  to  abandon  the  attitude  of 
empiricism  which  for  a  time  he  had  espoused,  and  to  look  for  its  cor- 
rective. In  swinging  too  far  toward  the  other  pole  he  was  unable  to 
appreciate  the  dynamic  and  changing  character  of  the  mind's  reaction 
and  the  fact  that  it  reacts  as  one  whole.  The  functional  view  of  mind 
and  reality  dissolves  the  parallelism  or  dualism  that  prevailed  a  quarter 
of  a  century  ago,  but  not  by  again  assuming  a  fixed  datum  to  which  all 
else  must  adjust  itself  and  leaving  unsolved  the  old  question  of  how  this 
can  be  related  to  mind.  Pragmatism  essays  the  interpretation  of  reality 
in  terms  of  the  whole  circle  of  human  needs  and  ideals.  It  is  Dewey's 
reflex-arc  concept  again,  carried  out  to  its  completest  application.  To 
do  this,  it  insists,  we  need  not  have  resort  to  absolute  idealism  with  its 
speculative  entities. 

Pragmatism  would  turn  to  social  psychology  for  an  attempt  to  define 
reality,  if  reality  must  be  defined.  Our  ideas  are  social  products,  our 
recognized  realities  are  social  achievements  and  they  are  just  what  they 
are  to  the  social  consciousness.  This  does  not  remove  or  restrict  any  of 
the  implications  that  are  secured  by  other  philosophic  creeds  or  systems. 
Some  are  concerned  about  such  portions  of  reality  as  do  not  come 
within  immediate  experience-prehistoric  events,  whorls  of  star  dust, 
molten  rock  a  thousand  years  ago.  What  about  the  whole  of  reality 
and  how  about  knowing  reality  completely  ?  The  postulates  of  immedi- 
ate experience  do  not  exclude  reality  that  transcends  individual  human 
consciousness.  They  simply  correlate  reality  with  the  consciousness  of 
humanity  in  all  its  scope  and  possibilities.  To  those  who  clamor  for  a 
still  more  transcendent  reality  pragmatism  stands  with  its  unconquered 
challenge — What  other  meaning  has  reality  than  that  which  is  revealed 
in  social  consciousness  ?  And  this  challenge  is  not  only  compatible  with 
the  essence  of  Kant's  work,  but,  as  we  have  seen,  is  almost  a  liberal 
paraphrase  of  his  own  terminology. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

ARMSTRONG,  A.  C.     Transitional  Eras  in  Thought. 

BALFOUR,  A.  J.     The  Foundations  of  Belief. 

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